Rhetorical Analysis

For this week's blog posting, I would like for you to visit the Student Pulse website and choose an essay (from the English subject category) to analyze rhetorically.  Use the questions and concepts that you were given in class in order to guide your writing.

The purpose of this assignment is to begin thinking critically about what decent academic writing entails.  I want you to consider the rhetorical dimensions of writing rather than merely staying focused on matters of "correctness" (grammar, punctuation, CD CM patterns, or whatever).  The idea is to figure out the norms and expectations associated with this genre.

One big question that I am looking for you to answer with this analysis is whether the essays found on Student Pulse contradict any of the "rules" you have been told to follow.  Does the essay that you've chosen to analyze surprise you in any way?  Does it do things that might seem unconventional?

Please create a sustained piece of writing.  Do not just number the page and answer the questions that I gave you in class.  Just use the questions as a heuristic--a way of generating ideas.  

This posting should be about 500 - 600 words (that's about two double spaced pages).  It should also contain a LINK to the article that you have chosen to analyze.  This is due Tuesday (9/6) before you arrive in class.

The Danger of a Single Story

While watching this video, I was most interested in Chimamanda Adichie’s account of the student who—after reading her novel—told her it was a shame that Nigerian men were physically abusive. Having no other stories of Nigerian life to draw upon, the student assumed that the father character in the book was representative of all Nigerian men. This leads Adichie to reflect on how, although she had read a book called American Psycho, she never imagined that its main character was an embodiment of American men in general. Having read authors like Updike, Steinbeck, and Gaskell, she explains that she was well aware that not all Americans were serial killers. She then briefly acknowledges how this imbalance of awareness is the result of an uneven distribution of power around the globe, which has given certain voices and cultures a greater platform than others. However, this is one of the few places where she acknowledges the role that power plays in determining the type of stories that can be told, the manner in which they are told, who is authorized to tell them, and how they get distributed. So I would like to extend this conversation a little further by examining how these issues intersect with scholarship in rhetoric and composition. Specifically, I would like to investigate how the demand for clarity in writing, which is taken for granted as a goal of effective writing instruction, often conceals similarly oppressive power structures—power structures that actively prevent minority voices, the voices of Others, from expressing themselves and being heard.


In the foreword to a collection of essays entitled Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, Min Zhan-Lu and Bruce Horner describe how Standard American English has become an instrument of cultural imperialism. They argue that because “correct English” is considered to be the “language of American truth [and therefore] the Truth of the (technologically) Developed World,” it is currently “being used by international organizations such as the World Bank to constrain life in ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’ worlds” (ix). Take for example the events surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics: “for the ‘privilege’ to ‘host’ the Olympics, [there was a requirement that] all road or shop signs in [the city] had to include an English translation” (xii). This forced many small business owners to rely on computer software in order to translate their business names. In one noteworthy case, it was reported that a fast food restaurant mistakenly posted a sign out front that said, “No Translation or Server error.” Now, on the surface this might seem like nothing more than a humorous anecdote; however, it can also be read as a consequence of America’s ostensible right to “enjoy global access without having to sweat over the learning of another language” (xii). Believing our worldview to be an expression of truth, we often fail to see the oppression that results when we insist that others conform to our language and lifestyle.


In the most recent (February 2010) issue of College Composition and Communication, Ian Barnard maintains that the demand for students to produce “clear” writing is based on a similar ideology. In order to illustrate this point, he cites a 2001 article from David Orr entitled “Verbicide” In this article, Orr complains that clarity is suffering because we are no longer “held together, as we once were, by the reading of a common literature or by listening to great stories, and so we cannot draw on a common set of metaphors and images as we once did. Allusions to the Bible and other great books no longer resonate because they are simply unfamiliar to a growing number of people” (28). Although it is not exactly what he intended us to take from it, Orr’s statement reveals how clarity is much more than a scientific or technical matter. In fact, his statement demonstrates that it’s largely about shared cultural realities: the Bible, a common literature, shared metaphors, etc. Therefore, it becomes apparent that anyone who wishes to speak in a particular language ends up being interpellated by its symbol system. Yet, as Frank Chin, Jeffrey Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong explain, “The minority experience does not yield itself to accurate or complete expression in white man’s language. Yet, the minority writer . . . is made to feel morally obligated to write in a language produced by an alien and hostile sensibility. His task . . . is to codify his experience in the form of prior symbols, clichés, linguistic mannerisms, and a sense of humor that appeals to whites” ("Representations" 23). Otherwise, the story is likely to be ignored or marginalized due to its “unclear” nature. Hence, while Adichie may encourage us to produce and consume a more diverse array of stories, it appears that this won’t get us far unless we also learn to negotiate the power structures which govern the way that these stories are circulated and told.


So a step in the right direction might involve thinking more about what we mean when we ask our students to write more clearly. After all, if we want to accept Adichie’s challenge to move past the danger of a single story, then maybe we also need to have the patience to carefully interpret the complexity and ambiguity of student and minority discourses the same as we would published authors like, say, James Joyce. As Chinua Achebe has said, “The price that a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.”