Brainstorm.
Having a topic, you'll then want to expand your ideas into content that'll go in the main body of your essay. Where do your ideas take you? While you're letting your mind run with your topic, keep track of all the interesting subtopics that you might use in your body paragraphs.
If you're having trouble coming up with points that both fit your topic and have enough substance to fill up the body of your essay, there are different strategies you can use to jump start your brain.
- List out concepts, read and make notes, or talk to a friend or tutor to feel your ideas take shape in conversation.
- Write or speak to yourself, record yourself if you prefer, and just see what's in your brain so you can organize it later.
- Freewriting is a method where you don't think about grammar or formality and just let your words flow.
- Mind-mapping is a popular method of laying out ideas and visually connecting them so you can see the relationships between your main topic and the satellite concepts that support it.
For more brainstorming ideas, try checking out this site for web writers.
There is no wrong way to brainstorm! Just do anything that works for you to get the ideas out of your head and onto the page so you can start working with them.
Well for a rhetorical analysis of an image that needs to be three to five pages long, I know that I'll only be able to make two or three main points. Part of the essay will go to an intro, a description of the image, and the context and/or background of the image, which will only leave me enough room to explore two or three big ideas as to the actual rhetoric behind the piece. So I'd better make them good.
The prompt, again, asks me to look at the rhetorical canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) or rhetorical appeals (ethos, pathos, and logos). Since my chosen subject is an image and not a speech, I think I'd best stick with the appeals (since there isn't really invention, memory, or delivery in an image). Ethos, pathos, and logos—I can brainstorm something out of that.
But before I start thinking up possible points I want to make, I'm going to think again about the main purpose of my essay. Let's return to the prompt again: it asks me to make and support a claim about how an image is being used. It tells me that the purpose of a rhetorical analysis is to read, analyze, interpret, and argue your position with evidence. So, to summarize:
My task is to use evidence to make an argument about the way that my image achieves its purpose.
Great. The components of this, then, are that I need:
- What I claim is the purpose of the image
- How I claim the image achieves that purpose
- Specifically keeping in mind the use of ethos, pathos, and logos
- Evidence to support these claims
So the purpose of the image, as I had sorted out before, is to get students to attend the event. This seems straightforward enough. The way that the image achieves that, then, is where my claim will really be made.
Thinking about ethos, pathos, and logos, I'm not seeing a lot of logos in the image. But ethos and pathos, certainly. Ethos, being the image's appeal to the audience's trust in the people involved, is the biggest thing present in the image: the whole thing is designed to make us want to see him, the man with the blue eyes, perform. His confident expression tells us he's sure of his own ability to entertain us. He's young and handsome, and intriguing. The ethos of the image is drawing us to attend, to see this man in action, to be entertained.
The pathos is a little subtler. There's the attractiveness of the man, sure, but there's also the drama of the whole image. The black and white of everything, including the man's skin, makes the blue of his eyes pop—it gives the viewer an emotional reaction of disquiet, but also of interest. That's the emotional appeal of a magic show, all wrapped up in this image: mystery, the desire to be tricked. It's weird, it's interesting, and it's likely to grab our attention.
I also don't want to forget, though, the whole background to this image. It's a religious show being advertised as a magic show, although it also does contain some actual illusion. The purpose behind the image's attempt to get students to attend the show, then, is actually a proselytizing purpose. They want to convert students to Christianity.
Ok, I feel like I've got some useful ideas floating around now. I can definitely use this.