- analyze the purpose of writer Brooke Gladstone and/0r illustrator Josh Neufeld in one spot in The Influencing Machine by using the other elements to point out what they hope to achieve with the writing and/or illustrations. You may choose to use some rhetorical strategies to explain what you see either or both of them doing.
- evaluate whether their tactics worked or didn’t work on you and why by using the standards.
Getting Started with Prewriting:
You may approach this list recursively, going back and forth between steps as you make decisions about your specific example for the paper and what you want to say about it. Your paper should go beyond simply answering these questions in order; these questions are here to get you thinking about content, not to help with the organization and presentation of that content.
- First, find some good, specific examples (2 or 3) of places in the book where it got a definite reaction from you. What reaction were the writer and/or illustrator (whom I’ll call author(s) to show you can focus on one or both of them) in each case hoping for? How can you tell? Is that the reaction you had? Why or why not? Did your personal experience and/or impediments color how you felt about this specific spot in the book? How? You will likely narrow these spots in the book down to one as you move on to the next step.
- Consider these spots in the book more objectively in terms of what we’ve said about rhetorical devices, the elements of reasoning, and the standards. What is the purpose of the chapters in which your examples appear? Figure out which example you’d like to work with based on your understanding of the authors’ larger purpose for that chapter and your reaction to or interest in it.
- Based on the above, fix your attention on one spot in the book, which may take up an entire page or just one panel, or it may be a repetition of an earlier panel that connects the two for some purpose. Analyze, using the elements of reasoning, how the authors are trying to achieve the purpose you’ve named above. Use other elements of reasoning to do this.and try to see things from the authors’ points of view (as writer and illustrator). Highlight at least three elements of reasoning in addition to purpose to talk about and put in bold type in your paper (you may insert them in parentheses if they interrupt your flow).
- Evaluate how well the athuor(s) achieve their purpose by attaching at least two standards to elements you’ve named.
- Consider how and why your own experiences, critical thinking, and/or impediments shape your reaction to this example. These may or may not come into your paper, but it’s always good to think about them.
- Your thesis statement should say something about how well the author(s) achieved their purpose in this example using the standards of critical thinking. Each of you may put different weight on these two things, depending on the interaction you had personally with the example you’ve chosen. It may take you two sentences to write this thesis statement; that is fine.
Writing the Paper: - Now that you have a thesis statement, create a paper using all the prewriting above that does the following;
- Introduces and gives context for the purpose of the example you’ll analyze, the chapter it appears in, and the larger purpose of the book. How do these things hook together? Lead up to and state your thesis about how well the authors achieve their purpose in this example.
- Proves your thesis statement in body paragraphs that point to specific things about your example and analyze those things. Use a topic sentence to focus each body paragraph around one point from the first sentence. Name three elements of reasoning aside from/along with purpose in your analysis. Use bold font to designate the elements.
- Uses the standards (at least two, in bold font) to evaluate how well the author(s) achieve(s) their purpose.
- Concludes with a paragraph describing why either the issue from the book matters or why understanding how well the authors met their purpose matters.
