Reflection Of Rhet Anal

Claire Churchwell Matthew Weinkam 9 December 2009 Reflection of Rhetorical Analysis

This paper was difficult to adjust to having never written a rhetorical analysis. Having done this assignment, I now know how to utilize and identify rhetoric in everyday situations such as an advertisement, a speech, a news article and so on. Reading the articles the first time around I did not know what was rhetorical about any of the words I was reading, and I did not know what the difference between logos and ethos was. Having learned these devices, I was able to write a pretty good paper. I learned what made an argument successfully persuasive. I also learned when an article was using a logical fallacy and to be careful about context. Knowing these things made my paper worth reading. I wrote about two articles that took opposing sides to the soda pop tax that is in question among health officials. In my paper, I was able to identify which article was the superior article based on the use of rhetoric in their arguments.

For example, the part of my paper where I state that the inferior article poorly utilizes rhetoric and relies solely and ethos to try to prove his point is one way where I successfully identify poor rhetoric. A good argument should be well-rounded and use a variety of the different rhetorical devices. Another good point I make is about the inferior article’s author’s use of logical fallacy. Having never known about these would never make my rhetorical analysis any good. The superior author relied more on logos to validate his argument. I am able to recognize that by understanding what logos is and why it is important to make an argument persuasive. When I discussed his use of statistics and logical reasoning, this further proved my understanding of rhetoric and the analysis of such. I also learned and think that it is important to mention how to decide whether or not an argument is good. A good argument is not necessarily the side of the argument that you agree with. I discussed that near the end of my paper. It is also important to give credit where credit is due. Just because one argument is not as good as another, that does not mean that the inferior argument did not make some valid points.

These were all new to me and now I can discuss the terms and use of them comfortably. I did this in my paper, which is one of the reasons that I believe my paper to be a successful rhetorical analysis.