Evaluation of Rhetorical Situations

In this blog post, I will locate three examples of acts of opinionated public speech by someone in my discipline. Then, I will analyze each rhetorical situation by giving an explanation of each of the following categories: author/speaker, audience and context.

Example #1: "Teachers Salaries (Opinion)"

Author: The speaker's blog is titled, "Remnants," and his URL includes his name: Anthony Pandolfo. The speaker is a man, as the URL tells us, but it is also evident through the way he writes and the blog's layout and style itself. He seems to be well-educated, because of his grammatically correct sentences and his seldom-known facts. He grew up in New Jersey, and now lives in Piscataway. Also, his career is not mentioned, but he has done some stage acting on the side. All this and more is in his other blog posts.

Audience: Although the author never truly gives a summary of the controversy, the facts and details can be assumed through his writing. He writes to an educated audience, who has some basic knowledge regarding the topic. The message is intended for them, because he does not provide surrounding context or an introduction regarding teacher's salaries and the issue behind it. He just blurts out his opinion and what he knows on the topic as soon as he starts writing.

Context: The blog post was published on January 14th, 2014. He uses Wordpress, which is a blogging website. The author mentions Governor Christie, and her idea of prolonging the school year; this was a popular topic last year, but not anymore. This, in fact, shaped his opinion written in the article. The author, being from the east coast, may have a different opinion than a person living on the west coast. Also, he could have been brought up around different sorts of schools, like private or charter, where the salary for teachers was not drastically small. He writes from Piscataway, New Jersey, and there are no other texts involved.

Example #2: "Low Salaries Keep Many Teachers Out of the Middle Class: Report"

Author: The author of this report is Rebecca Klein, who is an editor for Huffington Post Education. She has written many articles, regarding various problems and issues in the education field, which proves that she is credible. There is no public information on where she lives, or if she has another career, but she seemed to have published this article from the east coast, as the time is written in Eastern Standard Time.

Audience: The audience that Klein is writing to is not expected to know an extensive amount of background information regarding the topic. The author gives a very brief, but specific, summary of the controversy and what is has been happening with teacher's and their salaries. Her writing suggests that the audience should know that something has gone amiss with teacher's paychecks, but not necessarily what that something is.

Context: The article was published on Huffington Post on July 24th, 2014. She is writing in QRG format, and the conventions are to include visuals, hyperlinks, compact paragraphs and plenty of white space. The author may be answering some frequently asked questions regarding some changes in the education system, or lack thereof, that were happening last year. As taxes or expenses grow, teacher's salaries do not seem to; this fact has been discovered in the last few years, and Klein is addressing it in the article. Klein is writing in terms of American culture, and expects the readers to apply this knowledge to that background as well. She includes a vast amount of hyperlinks to various articles that are discussing the same ideas, and she uses them to expand on her topic.

Example #3: "Pay Teachers More"

Author: The author of this article is named Nicholas Kristof, who is an Op-Ed Columnist for The New York Times, since 2001. He grew up in Oregon, received his undergraduate at Harvard University and studied law at Oxford University as a Rhode Scholar. He speaks Chinese and Japanese, and has served as a foreign correspondent for the newspaper. He and his wife have written many books together, including "Half the Sky," which was listed as the No. 1 best seller. He has won two Pulitzer prizes, as well as some other humanitarian awards.

Audience: The author expects his audience to have a decent amount of background information on the topic as a whole and on some specifics of the topic. He shows this by immediately referring to a statement made about teacher's salaries, and then responding to it, without any introduction. He is writing for a well-educated audience, but despite his extensive word choice and sentence structures, the article comes off as casual and relaxed.

Context: The editorial was published on March 12, 2011 in The New York Times. This type of genre encourages the inclusion of personal pronouns, such as "we" "I" and "you." The author seems to be responding to events that had happened earlier in the year, as he refers to the "debates in Wisconsin" and such. He also refers back to the 1970's to provide a stark contrast between teacher's salaries then and now. The author writes from an American perspective, as he relates to other countries and their wages compared to our own. Some of his other articles relate to this text, as well as some other editorials by other authors.

Images Money. "Dollar." 08/8/2010 via Flickr.
Attribution 2.0 Generic License. 

--Jenny Bello



REFLECTION:

After looking through Rachel's and Lauren's posts on their blogs, I reviewed over my own. I think that my analysis was well-thought out and developed enough, and I realized that all my sources were from very different genres of writing. However, in Rachel's post, she included a text that was argumentative, yet presented in a way that evokes emotion. Similarly, in Lauren's blog, she included an article written by a former teacher, which brought in the idea of personal experience. I did not include any article in which the speaker was a teacher or directly related to the subject matter, and I wish I would have. This would have provided a better argument, in my opinion.

Overall, I think I included a decent amount of insight into each text or article, and that my thoughts were developed clearly and thoroughly. In the future, I will continue to research on this topic for a first-hand view point.