ENG 101 RHETORICAL ANALYSIS ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS WRITING PROMP…
ENG 101 RHETORICAL ANALYSIS ESSAY INSTRUCTIONS WRITING PROMPT Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the use of rhetorical appeals (pathos, ethos, and logos) in Cross’s article, “Propaganda: How Not to Be Bamboozled” OR Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the use of rhetorical appeals (pathos, ethos, and logos) in Robson’s article, “How Self-Deception Allows People to Lie.” ASSIGNMENT PARAMETERS/ APA GUIDELINES (Click link above to open) DETAILED WRITING INSTRUCTIONS (Click link above to open) PASSAGES FROM WHICH YOU MAY QUOTE IN THE ESSAY RULES: These are long passages. The material you quote from them should not consist of more than 40 words. Paraphrase what you can from an idea and quote only the essential wording. Quote twice in each body paragraph. There are several passages for Cross and for Robson, so try not to quote from the same passage twice. You do not need to quote from all of your author’s available passages. Try to quote from at least three of your author’s available passages. The in-text citations after each passage are models for you. They even use the correct page numbers. “Propaganda: How Not to Be Bamboozled” by D. W. Cross 257-267 in Language Awareness, which was published in 2023. PATHOS: Passage 1: Cross (1977/2023) advocated, “If we are to be led, let us not be led blindly, but critically, intelligently, with our eyes open. If we are to continue to be a government ‘by the people,’ let us become informed about the methods and purposes of propaganda, so we can be the masters, not the slaves of our destiny” (p. 267). Passage 2: According to Cross (1977/2023), “Propaganda works best with an uncritical audience. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister in Nazi Germany, once defined his work as “the conquest of the masses.” The masses would not have been conquered, however, if they had known how to challenge and to question, how to make distinctions between propaganda and reasonable argument” (p. 257). ETHOS: Passage 3: As Cross (1977/2023) explained, “Senator Yakalot engages in card stacking when he talks about the proposal to use smaller cars. He talks only about jobs without mentioning the cost to the taxpayers or the very real — though still denied — threat of depletion of resources. He says he wants to help his countrymen keep their jobs, but doesn’t mention that the corporations that offer the jobs will also make large profits. He praises the ‘American chrome industry,’ overlooking the fact that most chrome is imported. And so on” (p. 265). Passage 4: : Cross (1977/2023) demonstrated that “analogies can be drawn that are reasonable and fair. It would be reasonable, for example, to compare the results of busing in one small Southern city with the possible results in another, if the towns have the same kind of history, population, and school policy. We can decide for ourselves whether an analogy is false or fair by asking, ‘Are the things being compared truly alike in significant ways? Do the differences between them affect the comparison?'” (p. 264). LOGOS: Passage 5: According to Cross (1977/2023), “The false cause-and-effect fallacy is used very often by political candidates. ‘After I came to office, the rate of inflation dropped to 6 percent.’ But did the person do anything to cause the lower rate of inflation or was it the result of other conditions? Would the rate of inflation have dropped anyway, even if he hadn’t come to office?” (p. 263). Passage 6: Cross (1977/2023) helpfully modeled critical questioning when analyzing the fallacy of transfer: “How can we learn to spot the transfer device and distinguish between fair and unfair associations? We can teach ourselves to suspend judgment until we have answered these questions: ‘Is there any legitimate connection between the idea under discussion and the thing it is associated with? Leaving the transfer device out of the picture, what are the merits of the idea by itself?’” (p. 262). “How Self-Deception Allows People to Lie” by D. Robson PATHOS: Passage 1: Robson (2022/2023) explained that “This is only possible if you can accept your flaws, of course. The first step is acknowledging the problem. Perhaps you think that you don’t need this advice; self-deception only afflicts others, while you are perfectly honest with yourself. If so, that may be your greatest delusion of all” (p. 445). Passage 2: According to Robson (2022/2023), “This research might explain questionable behavior in many areas of life — far beyond the headline-grabbing scams in recent years. By understanding the different factors contributing to self-deception, we can try to spot when it might be swaying our own decisions, and prevent these delusions from leading us astray” (p. 440). ETHOS: Passage 3: Robson (2022/2023) invited readers to “begin with the research of Zoë Chance, an associate professor of marketing at Yale University. In an ingenious experiment from 2011, she showed that many people unconsciously employ self-deception to boost their egos” (p. 441). Passage 4: Robson (2022/2023) explained a theory that “self-deception allows us to be more confident in what we are saying, which makes us more persuasive. If you are trying to sell a dodgy product, for instance, you will make a better case if you genuinely believe it is a high-quality bargain — even if there is evidence to suggest otherwise. This hypothesis was first proposed decades ago, and a recent paper by Peter Schwardmann, an assistant professor of behavioral economics at Carnegie Mellon University, US, provides some strong evidence for this idea” (p. 442). LOGOS: Passage 5: : As Robson (2022/2023) explained, “Like Chance’s study, Schwardmann’s first experiments began with an IQ test. The participants weren’t given the results, but after the test was finished, they had to privately rate how well they thought they’d done. They then took a test of persuasion: they had to stand before a jury of mock employers and convince the panel of their intellectual prowess — with a potential 15 euro ($16, £12.80) reward if the judges believed that they were among the smartest in the group. Some people were told about the persuasion task before they rated their confidence in their performance, while others were told afterwards. In line with the hypothesis, Schwardmann found that this changed their ratings of their abilities: the prior knowledge that they would have to convince others resulted in greater overconfidence in their abilities, compared to those who had not yet been told. The need to persuade others had primed them to think that they were smarter than they really were” (p. 443). Passage 6: According to Robson (2022/2023), “One good way of puncturing all kinds of bias is to ‘consider the opposite’ of your conclusions. The technique is as straightforward as it sounds: you try to find all the reasons that your belief may be wrong, as if you were interrogating yourself. Multiple studies have shown that this leads us to think more analytically about a situation. In laboratory tests, this systematic reasoning proves to be much more effective than simply telling people to ‘think rationally’ (p. 445).