First Analyses

AP Language

August 20th, 2012

Themes: , , ,

Today we broke into groups to discuss the arguments you pulled over the weekend in order to give you an opportunity to work out the appeals with your peers.

As you presented your arguments to the class, we discussed several things that you should remember:

  1. The genres of rhetoric (or branches of oratory). These are another tool you may use to analyze arguments. Essentially, they ask “What does the speaker want his or her audience to do with the information?”
  2. The importance of external and internal credibility. To keep them straight, know that they are “ex-” or “in-” vis-à-vis the argument. So, external credibility comes from the audience’s trust in the author, any authorities speaking on behalf of the argument, the celebrity of the publication, etc. Internal credibility ((the one you’ll be relying upon, mostly)) comes from the apparent reasonableness of the argument, data or statistics that support your argument, and how well-written/delivered the piece is.
  3. The argument’s situation and timeliness, known as kairos. We discussed this when looking at a piece about the Olympics, noting that a connection between the games and jazz makes an interesting hook now, but interest is likely to wane in the coming months.

We will continue our discussions of your arguments tomorrow, so make sure you remember a copy.

Arguments presented today:

bbc3

Dadisman, Alec. “My Opinion.” Technology in the Classroom. 24 Mar. 2010. Web. 20 Aug. 2010.

Murphy, Sean. “Thoughts on the Olympics, Improvisation, and Jay Adams.” PopMatters. 8 Aug. 2012. Web. 20 Aug. 2012.

(If yours isn’t listed, just send me a link in an email.)