Rhetorical Analysis

Telling other people they're wrong.

Um, yeah, I can do that.

I'm a freelance editor. What that means is: I liked good writing, so I became a writer. I was a writer, but I realized I hit my stride at the age of 21, and therefore have given up writing mostly altogether. Also, none of the things I wrote fit into that ellusive "good writing" category. So then I became an editor so that I could vicariously live through my writers like some love-to-hate pagent mom. I tell them how much they suck, how terrible their sentence structure is, how they have to cut out an entire backstory because they didn't set it up enough. I encourage them, too; I'm not the Simon Cowell of editing. And plus, I'm freelance, and you catch more paying flies with honey than vinegar.

The freelance editor thing is cool, but few people can actually make that their career. Few people want to. Most use it as a resume booster. That's why what I really want to do is teach at the college level. I simply pictured the Rhetorical Analysis as pretending the essay was just turned in to you for a grade, and now you must play a rousing game of Find the Flaws.

I read the work, and I read it over agian. I read it so much I could quote it. My reasoning? You know how the more you get to know a person, the more you love them and the more you hate them at the same time, because you've discovered more things that bug you? That's my reasoning. The more I became aquanted with his text, his logic, the more I would find that was just "wrong, wrong, WRONG!" And then I simply wrote my feelings in an objective standpoint. Many of my favorite academic papers are people saying "This person who wrote this paper earlier is a total idiot, and here's why!" I just wrote one of those papers.

In the end, this paper exercized my skills at looking at an argument's logic. When I'm tutoring kids, I tend to notice gramatical stuff over logical stuff, so this essay definitely helped me tone that muscle that studies a paper's logic. Not only will this help in a tutoring sense (the logic is some of those kids' papers is JACKED!) But it will help when I eventually become a professor and have to read 130 of them at once.