Draft Thesis Statements

After using the "Creating a Rhetorical Analysis Thesis Statement" box on page 192 of the Student's Guide, I wrote two thesis statements that I could use for my project 2 essay. Here is the article that I'm analyzing.

Rhetorical Situation and Strategies

• Author
• Jessica Samakow writes for Huffington Post Parents. She takes a biased stance on this issue, but that doesn't strongly affect her credibility. 
• Audience
• This article is targeted mostly to parents, but also to people in the field of psychology. 
• Purpose
• She is trying to persuade and inform readers that physical punishment should not be used to discipline children. 
• Ethos Appeals
• Word choice
• Tone 
• Acknowledgement of opposing side
• Pathos Appeals
• Emotionally Compelling Story
• Shocking Statistics
• Key Word Repetition
• Logos Appeals
• Expert Opinon
• Statistics
• Clear Transitions

Thesis Statements

"In having an audience that is somewhat aware of her topic, Samakow is able to go right into analysis without having to provide a substantial amount of background. As a result, she is more able to freely explore all of the intricacies of the controversy while providing her audience proper evidence and reasoning to support her stance and beliefs."

• I think from here, it would be fairly easy to transition into analyzing and dissecting her argument and the strategies that she used to construct it. 
• Even if I do use this initially in my essay, I might find that it is too narrowly focused to be usable and have to adapt or rewrite it. 

Image by Nenyaki. "Write till you drop!" Uploaded 4/9/08 via Flickr.
Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Genric license. 

"Appealing to her audience and the personal and sensitive nature of this subject, Samakow focuses her argument on the emotions rather than the statistics; her use of logic and evidence only serves to support her emotionally-based claims."

• This thesis would work well to then discuss the rhetorical strategies, but it might not leave enough room to talk about the rhetorical situation. I'm not exactly sure how to fix that, but I think that when I have more of my paper written, I will have a better idea of what direction I need to go in.

Reflection:

Savannah wrote two good theses (is that the plural of thesis?). Her first one would likely be easier to write her essay from. She is more focused on the logical arguments than I am, but her topic is more scientific and technical than mine. 

Kelly wrote three theses that are more varied than mine or Savannah's. This gives her a lot of flexibility as far as what direction she wants to take her paper. She also mentioned the purpose and the audience in her thesis so that her readers know exactly what the author was intending with the specific rhetorical strategies that he chose. 

While we all have different topics and approaches to our papers, we all successfully wrote theses that will help us address the project guidelines.