Karen Mack

Rhetorical Analysis

I have never really taken the time to analysis my own writing and consider why I make the choices that I do in a given piece, mostly because after I write something I typically just want to forget it and move on. But as a future English teacher who will someday have to teach writing strategies to a bunch of high school students, I now understand why this is not the best attitude to have about my own writing. To determine how rhetorical situations shape my writing, I decided to conduct a rhetorical analysis of an essay I wrote for an honors English class structured around the consideration of whether individual freedom should be sacrificed for the creation of social order.  

I decided to evaluate this essay because I think it's one of the most passionate pieces I have ever wrote. Crafting this essay was the result of reading “The Modest Proposal,” 1984, several news articles, and watching The Handmaid’s Tale.  If you aren’t familiar with these texts or this movie, all you need to know for the sake of this rhetorical analysis is that “The Modest Proposal,” 1984, and The Handmaid’s Tale all discuss the role of women in society and how women are only considered in terms of their reproductive value. Additionally, all of these sources referenced some kind of abuse toward women, and the news article I referenced in this paper, “For Female Candidates, Harassment and Threats Come Every Day,”discusses how female political candidates suffer constantly from sexual harassment. After taking the time to consider these texts and this film, I felt motivated to write this essay in order to defend women’s sexuality because of the slut-shaming and sexist ideas that still plague our society making the oppression of women expressed in these ways still relevant today.

The effect I hoped that this paper had was to convince my audience that women’s sexuality is restricted for the sake of social order, and it should not be. I wanted my writing to bring people together who believe that women should have the same rights as men. As this paper was for an assignment, I did have several constraints determining how I would go about making my argument. There weren’t many rules for the assignment, but we were asked to write a paper between five and seven pages and use the stories we discussed in class, but we were also allowed to include additional sources. Furthermore, we had to be sure to refer to social order and individual freedom in some sense and include quotes as evidence to support our claims. Another constraint I had was how limited my audience was for this piece. Specifically, this essay was meant for a single professor to read, so I did write this paper in a way in which I hoped would earn me a good grade. Yet, generally, I see the audience of this essay to be anyone interested in how the relationship between social order and individual freedom affects women. This paper was not really open for audience interaction.

Throughout this paper I used logos, pathos, and ethos to argue my claim and appeal to my audience. I demonstrated logos by referring to my different sources often and using quotes where applicable. I also used a current and reliable news source to add to my evidence and show my audience that these issues are still prevalent today. Using logos also enabled me to project ethos because I had a lot of evidence that enhanced my credibility. I also attempted to demonstrate ethos in this paper by referring to myself and to my audience. I referred to my audience in a way that I hoped to draw a commonality between myself and them, rather than to blame them for the problem. I said things like: “our society” and “we do not” in order to establish that we were on the same side. I also applied pathos in this paper by using emotionally dense words and phrases and talking about particularly shocking events that took place within these sources. I used words and phrases such as: “rape death,” “ripped to shreds,” “sexual assault,” “threat to the patriarchy,” “exploitation of their bodies” and “sexual oppression.” I think that these phrases accurately represent the passion and emotions I wanted to bring into this paper, and I hope that my audience was also stirred by my evidence and emotional contributions to this paper.  

Something that was different for me for this assignment was the use of my voice and tone within my paper. At the time I wrote this essay, I was already extremely familiar with the idea of writing an analytical essay, but up until writing this paper I had always been told to approach my essays with an objective response. Thus, this is how I wrote the first draft of my essay on suppressing female sexuality. Then, I had the opportunity to have a conference with my professor, and he told me something that I definitely wasn’t expecting. He told me I needed to get mad. He explained to me that I had all the evidence and presented it well, but I wasn’t being bold enough to argue the topic. This was extremely eye-opening for me, and I responded to this new knowledge by adding some sarcasm to my draft and a more outraged conclusion. It felt good and powerful to get to say things like, “the only reason that women face this sexual oppression is to keep them from having as much power as men.”

Overall, the rhetorical situation in which I wrote this paper definitely affected how I decided to craft my argument. Because this was a formal paper, I spent a lot of time considering my audience and ensuring that I had enough evidence to back up my claims, but due to the conversation I had with my professor, I also spent a lot of time reviewing my paper and putting in more of my own voice and beliefs. This experience affected my writing because it reminded me that analytical and research papers are not just a collection of data, but also a reflection of a person’s personal ideas. Since having this experience, I’ve learned to embrace the idea that academic writing should be personal and that my voice matters.

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