English, Literature and Philology

In this assignment, you will consider one of the essays you have read about gentrification/dispossession and explain how it persuades readers to believe or to do something. What that something is you will have to identify for your reader—and perhaps you have already done so (if you wrote a summary about the essay you choose to analyze for this assignment). But answering this “what” question is only the first step in this assignment; answering the “how” question is the real work of rhetorical analysis.

Audience and Purpose

For this essay, you should write to a classmate who has read the essay you’re analyzing but finds the essay unpersuasive. You may or may not agree with your classmate’s assessment—that is, you may or may not regard the essay as advancing an effective argument—but you recognize that some audience does find it persuasive. So your job is to explain to your classmate why. To put this responsibility in slightly different terms, it would be all too easy to conclude that anyone persuaded by an argument we find unconvincing must be stupid or ill-informed or unsophisticated. But if we assume that none of these things is true of the audience convinced by the essay we find unconvincing, then we need some explanation for why the essay is convincing to them. Provide your reader with such an explanation, offering your own claims and supporting those claims with evidence from the essay you’re analyzing, in no less than 1,000 words.

Developing your argument

You can begin constructing your argument by considering the following questions:

How does the author construct his or her ethos, and what is the character of that ethos?
What appeals address the audience’s emotions, values, or experiences (pathos), and what assumptions about those emotions, values, experiences lie behind the appeals?
What evidence and claims does the author make, and how would you describe the quality of that evidence?
What exigence does the essay appear to address?
NOTE: Although you should consider the above questions (and others that follow from them), these questions should serve as a starting point, not an outline for your paper. In other words, don’t just go down the list of bullet points above when you write you analyses.