Rhetorical Considerations – academic acers

As you are writing your summary, ask yourself what is important about Poole’s essay.

What is the primary claim (thesis) of this essay?
What are the supporting claims and how do they work with the thesis?
What evidence does Poole use to support his claims?
What does Poole add to the conversation about monsters that you haven’t seen before?
What new concepts does he introduce?
How are those concepts helpful in understanding the idea of monsters?
Why do the arguments in this essay matter? To whom do they matter? What is there to be learned and gained by understanding this article well?

Rhetorical Considerations

Purpose: I have many purposes for assigning this paper.

First, being able to quickly and accurately summarize an argument is useful in a number of situations, from a dinnertime debate with your family to participation in other classes to participation in work-place decisions. Being able to find, draw out, and reiterate the major points of another author will help you in many of the interactions you’ll have while at the U and later.
Second, nearly every paper that you write will need to incorporate summaries of the essays, reports, books, ideas already written on your topic. In longer papers, you need to show the ways that you are participating in an on-going conversation, and you do that by including summaries of some of the important ideas on the subject in your paper (typically in the introduction). This is often called a literature review.
Audience: Arguably every piece of writing has an intended audience: that group of people, or even single person, who you are trying to communicate with or persuade. As the audience changes, so must the paper. Different people like to hear arguments in certain ways, or need particular facts, or maybe even prefer an emotional argument to a logical one. Knowing your audience is an essential element of writing a rhetorical and paper.

Most of the writing you will do will have multiple audiences. For this paper, assume your audience is another student at the University who has not read this essay, but is interested in monsters.

Formatting

The paper should be 500-600 words. It must be word-processed, double-spaced, written in a standard 12-point font, with standard margins, and contain a works-cited page at the end (even if it’s just one work and we all know who it is, it’s good practice).

This paper must include:

An introduction that informs the reader that this is a summary of an essay by including the title of the essay and the author of the essay (full name – W. Scott Poole).
A statement or two that summarize the primary claim of the essay being summarized.
A thesis that focuses the reader in a certain direction with regard to the primary claim of the essay being summarized.
Proper in-text citation for the ideas and words you take from the essay and remain focused on the text. Really, the author should be referenced a few times on each page, as you’ll be using evidence from him. You must always ground your analysis and summary in the text.
Transitions connecting paragraphs and ideas to each other and back to the thesis.
A conclusion that brings your analysis to a close.
A works cited page.

For more information on Rhetorical Considerations read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric