As we’ve seen, rhetorical analysis is a way of reading a text. Rather than just asking “what’s this text about,” rhetorical analysis asks: “what is this text trying to do or achieve? How does it accomplish its goals (or fail to accomplish its goals)?

Although it might seem like a specialized skill, we actually perform rhetorical analysis all the time. It’s how we make meaning of statements in context.

For this assignment, we’ll practice performing rhetorical analysis by analyzing the densely contextual medium of Twitter. By analyzing tweets about a familiar subject, you’ll be able to demonstrate how rhetorical analysis can help to discover meaning within a text.

Step 1: Search for tweets about a subject you are interested in and know something about. For instance, if you are a fan of the New Orleans Pelicans NBA team, you could google search “twitter #pelicans” to find tweets about the team (and probably a few tweets about the actual birds).

Step 2: From the list of tweets with your chosen hashtag, choose two that would require rhetorical context to understand. Did something just happen that people are tweeting about? Are people angry or upset about something? Or are they celebrating something that happened? It’s probably fairly easy to find out what’s going on right now, but think about the effect of rhetorical situation on texts from the past—and how important it is to consider this kind of contextual information when doing a close reading of any text.

Step 3: For each of your tweets, write a short (1 paragraph) rhetorical analysis that includes the tweet (can be a screenshot) along with the answers to these questions:

• Who is writing?
• Who is the intended audience?
• What is the rhetorical situation? That is, what situation is this text responding to?
• What is the message? In particular, is the intended meaning the same as the stated meaning?