Major assignment 3 lecture four going back to the prompt
- 1. MAJOR ASSIGNMENT 3: RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF A SCHOLARLY ARTICLE Lecture Four: Going Back to the Prompt
- 2. CONTENTS • In this lecture, you will find: • A brief summary of “Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning” by Christina Haas and Linda Flower • An explanation of what it means to read “beyond the content” of a text • An explanation of how reading this article can help you better understand the prompt (assignment instructions) for major assignment 3 • A doggo • A list of skills you can take with you into other classes and situations
- 3. A BRIEF SUMMARY OF HAS AND FLOWER • Haas and Flower argue that there are two ways to read a text: to understand its content (they call this “knowledge- getting”), and to understand its context—the motivations of the writer; what the writer wants the text to do; why the writer wrote in the first place (they call this “rhetorical reading”). • This made a lot of sense to me when I read it. I think a lot about how I can get students to understand the difference between summary (understanding content) and analysis (being able to critique a text or understand its “deeper meaning”).
- 4. A BRIEF SUMMARY OF HAS AND FLOWER (CONT’D) • “While a content representation is often satisfactory—it certainly meets the needs of many pre-college read-to-take-a-test assignments—it falls short with tasks or texts which require analysis and criticism. What many of our students can do is to construct representations of content, of structure, and of conventional features. What they often fail to do is to move beyond content and convention and construct representations of texts as purposeful actions, arising from contexts, and with intended effects” (437). • In other words, the way you’ve probably been taught to read has a lot to do with getting you to answer content or reading comprehension questions. It’s kind of like the five-paragraph essay of reading: a great place to start, and helpful for beginners, but not particularly flexible, and a somewhat inadequate vehicle for the kinds of deeper analysis you’ll be asked to do as you go forward in your education.
- 5. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO GO “BEYOND CONTENT”? WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO UNDERSTAND? • “To interpret any sophisticated text seems to require not only careful reading and prior knowledge, but the ability to read the text on several levels, to build multi- faceted representations. A text is understood not only as content and information, but also as the result of someone’s intentions, as part of a larger discourse world, and as having real effects on real readers” (Haas and Flower 437). • We can see, right now, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of understanding writers’ intentions, understanding the “larger discourse world” (that is, the conversation going on at the time a text was written), and understanding the effects a text can have on readers. Let’s take a look at a concrete example.
- 6. GOING BEYOND CONTENT (CONT’D) • I took this from a friend’s Facebook page today. • If you read this purely for content, you’ll understand that this person thinks that people in the US probably had COVID-19 in November-December 2019, and that they lived through it, and that people shouldn’t listen as much to “the media”. • But Haas and Flower would want us to ask, in order to go beyond the content: who is this person? Why would he say this? What effect is it going to have on readers?
- 7. GOING BEYOND CONTENT (CONT’D) First of all, I have no idea who this person is. I googled “Kyle Witkowski twitter coronavirus,” and I could not find out thing one about him. A Google image search did yield this same picture, but it seemed to suggest he works for a real estate company. In other words, I cannot establish his credibility or his authority. Haas and Flower would argue that, because I’m missing this piece of the wider context, I cannot get a full understanding of this text.
- 8. GOING BEYOND CONTENT (CONT’D) Second of all, why would he say this? The exigence (see Lecture One for a definition of “exigence”) is the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s easy enough to spot. But what is his motivation? One way you can figure that out is by looking for calls to action. This can reveal what the writer wants to happen. In this case, this person says, “Quit letting the media control you” and “Now give me back my toilet paper, sports, etc”. What does this suggest to you about his motivation(s)?
- 9. GOING BEYOND CONTENT (CONT’D) Finally, what is the intended effect on the reader? Because we’ve looked for the calls to action (“quit letting the media control you”; “give me back my sports”), we have some insight into the writer’s motivations. He seems to be motivated by exasperation at what he sees as an overreaction hyped up by the media.
- 10. BRIEF PAUSE FOR CLARITY • Here’s a question I anticipate you asking: But how can you know for sure that that’s what this person’s motivations are? • The answer is, I can’t. We often can’t talk to the writers of the things we read. However, I can make an educated guess based on the kinds of analyses Haas and Flower recommend people conduct when reading.
- 11. GOING BEYOND CONTENT (CONT’D) What, then, is the intended effect on the reader? The intended effect is to get people to uncancel sports events, stop hoarding toilet paper, and stop listening to what the media has to say. Right now, in this moment, all of those things are extremely dangerous. (Well—if people stopped hoarding TP, that actually would be great.) The underlying message here is: you don’t have to take this so seriously. But we do have to take it seriously. And if no one read between the lines of the information we take in during this time, we would all fall pretty to a lot of bad information, and people would suffer.
- 12. THE IMPORTANCE OF ANALYSIS • We’ve already seen the consequences of this kind of bad information. People have been seriously injured by taking off-label malaria drugs; by ignoring social- distancing protocols; by not listening to experts but instead relying on men in ties on Twitter. • As you can see, asking yourself who’s doing the writing, why they’re doing the writing (their motivations) and what they want the writing to do (the intended effect on the reader, or the aim of the writing) will give you a much deeper understanding of a text. It can also literally save your life.
- 13. OKAY, THAT GOT HEAVY. DOGGO BREAK! This is my cousin Kim’s former seeing-eye dog, Van. He’s a Labradoodle, and he crosses his paws because HE IS A GENTLEMAN.
- 14. GOING BACK TO THE PROMPT • So how does all this help us better understand the prompt for major assignment 3? Well . . . • From the prompt: “This assignment asks you to practice the rhetorical reading strategies that Haas and Flower describe in ‘Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of Meaning’ (p. 432).” • Now we have a much better understanding of what those reading strategies are, and what it means to try to reconstruct a text’s exigence, motivations, and aims. We now know that it means that we’re trying to go beyond content when we’re reading by drawing conclusions based on what’s in a text.
- 15. TRANSFERABLE SKILLS Hopefully, this lecture has demonstrated to you the following transferable skills: • Reading to do more than just understand content • The importance of analyzing a text based on the writer’s motivations and aims
- 16. WHAT’S NEXT? In the next lecture, I’ll take you through the steps of historicizing the text you chose for this assignment.