Essay 1: Rhetorical Analysis of a Written Text

The Prompt

The first unit for our course focuses on Justine Sacco, the young woman whose career and personal life were temporarily ruined after her ignorant AIDs tweet started trending on Twitter. In the two articles we read, Sam Biddle and Siri Srinivas both argue, for different reasons, that the internet’s treatment of Sacco was unfair and unwarranted. For this first essay, you will discuss both of these articles and argue which you think would be more successful in persuading its intended audience based on the writer’s use of strategies. Your essay should do the following:

1. Introduce and briefly discuss both Biddle’s and Srinivas’s texts, focusing on their arguments and use of rhetorical strategies.
2. Make an argument about whose text you think might be more successful in persuading its intended audience.
3. Support your argument with textual examples. Pick at least two different strategies from your chosen text and analyze them, thinking specifically about how and why they might persuade the article’s audience.
4. Include a brief counter argument explaining why the second text is not as persuasive as the article you chose. Provide at least one example to support this claim.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec…

https://gawker.com/justine-sacco-is-good-at-her-jo…