hey guys welcome back to coach all rights for today's video we're going to be talking about how to analyze the rhetorical situation in order to develop the commentary for your rhetorical analysis essay that's question 2 of the a-peeling exam in this video I'm going to be giving you guys some tips that have helped my students in the past particularly I'm going to be giving you guys some examples of some useful verbs I call them Power verbs but some people call them rhetorically accurate verbs same thing also some sentence frames and questions you can ask while
you're annotating as well as some samples that you guys can see exactly what this looks like in case you're not sure how to put it all together in order to be able to write effective commentary you need to understand what commentary actually is so commentary is your analysis or interpretation of the text you're specifically going to be looking at the choices that a writer or speaker makes and you're going to be examining the rhetorical situation you need to have developed commentary that analyzes the connections between these various elements in order to make sure that you're
thoroughly examining the text so that means that you're actually gonna have more commentary than evidence in your essay if your thesis statement is the cornerstone of your essay then think of the commentary as the glue that ties everything together it helps you explain your evidence and it helps you create a line of reasoning so one general question I tell my students to ask themselves is why this choice for this audience on this occasion while that question is helpful it's important to actually understand what the rhetorical situation is it has multiple parts you might have heard
of soapstone or space cat but basically those are two different acronyms that can help you analyze the rhetorical situation so the rhetorical situation is made up of the writer or speaker the audience there's the context and exigence some people combine those to say occasion which i think is totally fine and then you've got the purpose which is really important and also the message so these are the different elements of the rhetorical situation so you need to make sure that you are analyzing these and why that choice that the author is making is important to the
rhetorical situation one of the things that has helped my students start to analyze the rhetorical situation is understanding that they can use very precise verbs in order to convey their ideas and so I'm going to give you guys a list of verbs here and so the idea is to choose the verb that is most appropriate so some are synonyms for each other but others are actually not synonyms and they need to be used in very particular situations but the idea is that if you use the right verb it can help you convey the idea that
you need to convey and so precise word choice can help you actually lead into more effective commentary one of the trends that I've noticed among my own students who I would consider to be emerging writers is that they understand the rhetorical situation but when they go to write an essay they just don't develop their commentary enough because quite frankly they really aren't sure what to say and they feel like they don't have enough time to develop their ideas and they want to just move on to the next rhetorical choice thinking that more choices will help
their score in actuality more analysis is going to help the score so these are some questions that you can ask yourself about the writer or speaker you can ask yourself what are the speaker's qualifications because this could pertain to credibility you can also ask yourself what is this choice reveal about the speaker's beliefs values or needs now that one is directly tied to one of the college board standards so that one's a really important one you can also connect it to the audience as well so what's the relationship with the audience now let me show
you guys some sentence frames that you can use because these questions are good but sometimes kids wonder how do I actually use this in my writing in case you're unfamiliar with sentence frames let me just explain how they work at least in my classroom anytime you see the ellipses or the three dots that means that you're supposed to finish the sentence you are also welcome to change the sentence construction and make it fit the text that you're analyzing and you can change the word choice as well the reason I like sentence frames is because they
help students learn some of the more advanced syntax and so this is a way to help you actually put more sophisticated thoughts together however I will admit that sometimes they seem a little bit formulaic but I have found that students can actually make them their own so here are some examples of what this would look like using those frames but applying it to an actual prompt so you can see that the speaker is in blue and then there's still some purpose worked in here so that's in that purple color and so these are some ways
that you can combine elements of the rhetorical situation now granted it's still only a sentence but it's a way to start to lead into the thoughts that you have about the text just a quick note for clarification purposes as well these are not complete examples because it says stating that and then it trails off but that would be where you would actually include your evidence and so remember that you want to embed your evidence into your own sentence is and this can either be a direct quote or a paraphrase but if you embed your evidence
it reads in your own voice and it flows a lot better now let's talk about the significance of the audience and how you can use that to develop your commentary so I'm going to give you guys some questions that you can ask yourself but keep in mind that letters and speeches have a very clear audience in fact that's told to you in the prompt so you really want to dig into that relationship between the speaker and the audience but keep in mind too that you could be given something that is not a speech or a
letter for instance an article well an article still has a target audience but sometimes you're not actually told that in the prompt and you have to really dig into the passage to figure it out so when you do this make sure that you're not saying things like everybody or Society because you want to be more specific if you can narrow it down to perhaps teachers or a political party or a particular generation that shows a more astute understanding of the passage so the audience can still be a large group of people but the writer isn't
writing to everybody the writer is writing to a specific group of people so figure out what they're trying to say and figure out who they're trying to convince and that will help you figure out who the audience actually is when it comes to analyzing the audience my own students have told me that they know who the audience is but usually they don't know how to incorporate that into their essay in a way that feels natural so one of the things that has helped them is using sentence frames like this but also realizing that the elements
of the rhetorical situation work together so sometimes when you're bringing up the audience it's also really natural to bring up purpose or even the occasion as well so don't think about these things as separate think about them as all puzzle pieces of the same puzzle so for instance you're going to notice that in that second example we're not only looking at who Lord Irwin is but also his title so the credentials of the speaker matter but also the credentials of the audience matter and then you'll notice that we're looking at the fact that India was
under British control well that has to do with the context so you can actually incorporate multiple elements of the rhetorical situation into a sentence and that shows that you have a more in-depth understanding of the text I mentioned context in that last example so now let's talk about how analyzing the context can actually help you improve your commentary so one of the more obvious connotations of the word context is historical context now if history is not your thing freak out just yet because the College Board actually provides you with everything you need to know to
be successful so one of the things that you need to understand is that the context is inside both the prompt and the passage so make sure that you're not just glossing over that prompt really look for dates and other references to the time period to make sure that you understand what's going on in that passage here are a couple sentence frames that you can use in order to incorporate an analysis of context into your essay one question that I've been asked before is if I know historical information can I weave it into the essay and
technically the answer is yes in fact if you can do it well I would say go for it because it can add a little bit of sophistication to your piece but make sure you're not overloading it with history make sure you're still staying grounded into the passage because the task is to write a rhetorical analysis so you want to be analyzing choices and purpose here are two examples of how you can actually apply these sentence frames so you guys can see it in action and so the top one is from Florence Kelly's speech and so
for that one I actually used something that she referenced in the actual speech itself in order to incorporate a context whereas the bottom one is based on a speech from FDR and that one I had some outside knowledge about so I wove that into the context for that one so if you don't know anything about the actual historical time period that's okay you can probably find some reference to context in the actual passage itself these next questions have to do with exigence which is basically the catalyst what prompted the writers who write or the speaker
to speak but I also included the word occasion here because my own students have told me that sometimes even though they understand what the word exigence means they prefer to think of it as the occasion so in case that applies to other students out there as well I wanted to include both one of the things I've noticed about the exigence in the occasion is that sometimes students don't actually address that in their commentary very much and I think part of the reason why is because it's in the prompt and it's almost like students assume that
because it was in the prompt they don't need to bring it up in their analysis but that's actually not true you want to make sure that it's very clear that you understand the rhetorical situation so they're giving you that to make sure that you have that information but you need to examine that in your essay so be very specific if you're looking at a eulogy you need to examine the fact that the person is speaking at a funeral if it's a commencement speech be very specific that they're speaking at a grad raishin so keep in
mind that the occasion matters and even though it's given to you you still need to examine the significance of that now let's talk about purpose so as you're analyzing a passage you need to be mindful of the overall purpose of the passage as well as the purpose of the particular choices that you're analyzing so why did the author or speaker make those choices you need to be digging into both of those things the College Board has said that starting in 2020 they are going to be using three ways to phrase their prompts so this is
called stable wording so it's really important that students are familiar with these phrases how does the writer achieve his or her purpose convey his or her message or develop his or her argument so even if the prompt you're given doesn't actually use the word purpose you still need to analyze the purpose of the passage and also the purpose of the choices that the writer makes sometimes the purpose is actually included in the prompt itself but then students really struggle with trying to vary their word choice so what I've done here is I've given you guys
some purposes that are relatively common and I've also got you guys some synonyms that you could use so keep in mind though that some of these words have different meanings and they're not direct synonyms so you need to be very careful that you're using the appropriate word for the passage itself but it can be very helpful to know some other phrases to use that way you're not saying the same thing over and over again the final element of the rhetorical situation is the message now you'll remember that one of the possible ways that they could
phrase the prompt is how does the writer convey his or her message so even if your prompt doesn't actually use the word message you need to be thinking about what the message is because remember the speaker tailors his or her message to the audience so you need to be thinking about the main idea of this speech and why that main idea is relevant to the audience when analyzing the author or speakers message or even their argument it's really important that you specify what that message or argument is and if you're bringing that up multiple times
in your essay it's important that you specify that message or argument each time and that's gonna mean varying your word choice a little bit but it's very important that you're specific so that your reader knows that you understand the passage now let's talk about putting it all together so we're gonna go over some examples that include multiple elements of the rhetorical situation for this particular example I'm looking at the Madeleine Albright prompt and I kept the color-coding the same since you guys can see how the different elements of the rhetorical situation come up in this
particular paragraph so you guys might notice that I think I got five out of the six elements of the rhetorical situation the one that's missing is exigence but technically I talked about the audience and if the exigence is graduation and the audience is graduates and there is a little bit of overlap there but the idea is to analyze as thoroughly as possible so one of the tips I have is to work through the passage chronologically and look for the major choices and so for me one of the major choices that I found was her use
of examples and so I would look at these examples and try to figure out why she's using these examples for this particular audience on this particular occasion and you'll notice that there's different layers here so if you are practicing for the exam color coding can really help you can also make a little checklist on the side of your paper to make sure that you're analyzing the rhetorical situation but if you can't get all six I would try to aim for at least five out of six if you're just starting out maybe four out of six
but the idea is to be as thorough as possible because you want to aim for in my opinion at least a three out of four and evidence and commentary and so for each body paragraph you want to try to be as thorough as possible now another question that students sometimes have is how many body paragraphs do I actually need and quite frankly I feel like it's better for students to analyze as thoroughly as possible and so if that means you have to do fewer body paragraphs then that's fine I would rather have students do better
body paragraphs than more body paragraphs well I do think it's really important for students to practice writing strong paragraphs it can also be equally as important for students to practice writing strong sentences and so one thing to do would be to practice writing a strong sentence that incorporates multiple elements of the rhetorical situation and so what I've done here is I've demonstrated that and so you can see that I color-coded everything and I recommend that you guys practice this as well and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you guys the questions that
I ask myself in order to write this particular sentence in case modeling that for you help once you've written a sentence that you like and you think is effective you can actually take that sentence and use it as a model and you can take that sentence to make a sentence frame out of it so what I've done here is I've made a sentence frame out of the sentence that I just created on the previous slide and I'm going to show you guys how I took that scent frame and I actually applied it to a different
prompt so that sentence that was once about Madeleine Albright's commencement speech has now been adjusted to be about FDR if you guys found this video helpful please do me a favor and give the video a thumbs up and if you are an appealing student who is taking the 2020 a-peeling exam don't forget to subscribe to the channel turn the notifications on because I'm going to be doing several more videos between now and May 20th and I would hate for you to miss that content so until next time guys happy writing
