In preparing my ancillary for our first rhetorical analysis, I found the task to be more challenging than anticipated. The article that I chose to write my first paper on used several different types of rhetorical strategies (ironies, analogies, symbolism, sarcasm, etc.). The most prominent of strategies that the author used were irony, and counterexamples to support her argument on sexuality.
The challenge I seemed to run into was pinpointing which category these strategies fell into. Every time I would identify a piece of the article as one type of rhetorical strategy, I would find that the same piece might fall into one or more different types of strategy by definition. Is this possible? The more I compared the examples from the writing to the rhetorical strategy definitions, the more blurred some of the lines became.
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Hi Nichole,
ReplyDeleteIt's absolutely possible. Something could function as both irony and alliteration and appeal to authority all at once, for instance (note that the author uses sarcasm, and, yes, irony, early on in the comment that ends with "and Satan, in that order". That example would be both a reference (to Exodus, et. al.) and an example of irony, and even an example of a particularly sarcastic and mildly amused tone.
How do you talk about these overlaps? Well, focus on the overarching strategy that stands out. But you can certainly illustrate that some moves the author makes spans more than one type of strategy. Make sense?