Assignment 3

Rhetorical Description: Crafting the Image

length:  3-4 pages

due dates:  7.23 (proposal), 7.24 (draft),  7.26 (final)

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Just as there’s rarely such a thing as an objective, impartial, non-rhetorical visual image, there’s rarely such a thing as an objective, impartial, non-rhetorical description. Our goal is to use this fact to our advantage—not dishonestly, but carefully and persuasively, to shape an audience’s understanding of some person, place, or thing.

Your task is to subjectively describe a fascinating “object” (person, place, or thing—not event, which would be narrative rather than descriptive, and not general abstract phenomenon like “college” or “snowboarding”) in such a way as to persuade a particular view of that object:  positive, negative, nostalgic, disgusted, enraptured, melancholic but still hopeful, etc. Description is often—if not always—an act of persuasion, deliberate or otherwise. Think of description in a novel:  the purpose is rarely just to flesh out a fictional world or make it seem more realistic, but to shape a reader’s perspective, emotions, expectations, and so on.

In this case, you should be especially strategic in your description—you should write a description whose persuasive effects are not accidental but carefully calculated and cultivated. Decide what elements of the object in question you want to reveal and emphasize, and what elements you want to downplay because they don’t necessarily fit the dominant impression you aim to produce. Think, too, about what mode of description you want to use (recall the day we spent brainstorming different modes, from the obituary to the résumé to the Facebook profile), about what the expectations and constraints of that mode are (what kinds of details does a particular mode tend to dwell on?), about what kind of narrative voice might be effective and interesting (Kincaid’s second-person narration, Amram’s TV critic voice, etc.), and so on.  As the person describing the object, you must choose how to characterize it, and in an important way, therefore, you shape the object’s meaning and significance to your reader. Ultimately, you should aim to transform our understanding of or feelings toward your object.  As an audience, we should come away from your description with a new sense of what’s been described—not just a more vivid or detailed sense, but a sense that differs from how we imagined this person/place/thing before reading your essay.

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Due:  Friday night, 7.26.13 by midnight, via email.