800 words minimum
Paper #1: Rhetorical Analysis of News
Eng106 Spring 2020– Musgrave
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Length: 800-1300 words
Due Dates:
● First Draft – 02/03 (Digital and Print x2)
● Final Draft – 02/10 (Digital)
Assignment Description
Rhetoric is writing doing work in the real world. This course seeks to help you become both intentional
consumers and producers of rhetoric. With Climate Change being a global, systemic, multi-factorial issue,
discourse surrounding it takes infinite forms, sometimes muddying the waters as much as providing
clarity. This assignment asks you to find a piece of rhetoric (article/essay) from a popular/mass media
source that discusses Climate Change, read it closely, and then identify and analyze the way the writer
manipulates/controls language to ensure the piece ‘does work.’ Successful papers will first identify the
piece’s intended audience, its context, and its intent/purpose. From there, they will then analyze the tools,
techniques, and strategies the writer uses and evaluate the piece’s effectiveness in pursuing its purpose.
Your paper may address any of the following: Does the piece have a clear thesis? Does it provide
adequate support/evidence? In what ways is its context shaping it? Are there any patterns in word use or
phrasing? How do the word choices reflect/reveal their intention for the piece? Do they use any
metaphors, similes, or figurative language to illuminate the situation? Does that figurative language help
or hinder their goals/purpose? Are there common themes and/or objectives? How is the message shaped
to meet and appeal to its intended audience? How would these choices be received by other demographics
besides the intended audience? What appeals do they use (logos, pathos, ethos)? To what extent? Why?
Do they employ any fallacies? Are there any deficiencies or weaknesses in their position?
Resources to look at for articles: Other pieces by authors we’ve read; work by Emily Raboteau, Mary
Annais Helgar, David Roberts, Kate Aronoff, George Monbiot, Greta Thunberg; and/or work found in
Orion Magazine, The Sun Magazine, or any major news publication.
If you have any concerns about finding an article, or about whether an article you’ve found will work,
please contact me or visit my office hours. If you have any uncertainty, it is better to check with me
before starting your paper.
Assignment Process Requirements
● First Draft
● Peer Review
● Final Draft
Standard Formatting, a la the Syllabus, is required. Reminder: All components must be turned in on time
for the entire paper to be considered complete. Outlines are not rough drafts and will not be considered as
meeting the assignment criteria.
2/5/2020Re: generation – George Monbiot
https://www.monbiot.com/2019/02/18/re-generation/ 1/3
Re: generation
18
th
February 2019
Why older people must stand in solidarity with the youth climate strikes.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 15 February 2019
The Youth Strike 4 Climate gives me more hope than I have felt in 30 years of campaigning. Before
this week, I believed it was all over. I thought, given the indifference and hostility of those who
govern us, and the passivity of most of my generation, that climate breakdown and ecological
collapse were inevitable. Now, for the first time in years, I think we can turn them around.
My generation and the generations that went before have failed you. We failed to grasp the basic
premise of intergenerational justice: that you cannot apply discount rates to human life. In other
words, the life of someone who has not been born will be of no less value than the life of someone
who already exists. We have lived as if your lives had no importance, as if any resource we
encountered was ours and ours alone to use as we wished, regardless of the impact on future
generations. In doing so, we created a cannibal economy: we ate your future to satisfy our greed.
It is true that the people of my generation are not equally to blame. Broadly speaking, ours is a
society of altruists governed by psychopaths. We have allowed a tiny number of phenomenally rich
people, and the destructive politicians they fund, to trash our life support systems. While some
carry more blame than others, our failure to challenge the oligarchs who are sacking the Earth and
to overthrow their illegitimate power, is a collective failure. Together, we have bequeathed you a
world that – without drastic and decisive action – may soon become uninhabitable.
Every day at home, we tell you that if you make a mess you should clear it up. We tell you that you
should take responsibility for your own lives. But we have failed to apply these principles to
ourselves. We walk away from the mess we have made, in the hope that you might clear it up.
Some of us did try. We sought to inspire our own generations to do what you are doing. But on the
whole we were met with frowns and shrugs. For years, many people of my age denied there was a
GEORGE MONBIOT
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← Crisis? What Crisis? First Strike →
problem. They denied that climate breakdown was happening. They denied that extinction was
happening. They denied that the world’s living systems were collapsing.
They denied all this because accepting it meant questioning everything they believed to be good. If
the science was right, their car could not be right. If the science was right, their foreign holiday
could not be right. Economic growth, rising consumption, the entire system they had been brought
up to believe was right had to be wrong. It was easier to pretend that the science was wrong and
their lives were right than to accept that the science was right and their lives were wrong.
A few years ago, something shifted. Instead of denying the science, I heard the same people say
“OK, it’s real. But now it’s too late to do anything about it.” Between their denial and their despair,
there was not one moment at which they said “It is real, so we must act.” Their despair was another
form of denial; another way of persuading themselves that they could carry on as before. If there
was no point in acting, they had no need to challenge their deepest beliefs. Because of the denial,
the selfishness, the short-termism of my generation, this is now the last chance we have.
The disasters I feared my grandchildren would see in their old age are happening already: insect
populations collapsing, mass extinction, wildfires, droughts, heat waves, floods. This is the world
we have bequeathed to you. Yours is among the first of the unborn generations we failed to
consider as our consumption rocketed.
But those of us who have long been engaged in this struggle will not abandon you. You have issued
a challenge to which we must rise, and we will stand in solidarity with you. Though we are old and
you are young, we will be led by you. We owe you that, at least.
By combining your determination and our experience, we can build a movement big enough to
overthrow the life-denying system that has brought us to the brink of disaster – and beyond.
Together, we must demand a different way, a life-giving system that defends the natural world on
which we all depend. A system that honours you, our children, and values equally the lives of those
who are not born. Together, we will build a movement that must – and will – become irresistible.
www.monbiot.com
https://www.monbiot.com/2019/02/15/crisis-what-crisis/
https://www.monbiot.com/2019/02/22/first-strike/
2/5/2020 Re: generation – George Monbiot
https://www.monbiot.com/2019/02/18/re-generation/ 3/3
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