Using your knowledge of the dramatistic perspective from our class discussions and the tip sheet and the assignment sheet for Essay #1 (Blackboard>Course Documents), complete some prewriting on your essay and post it to you blog by midnight on Tuesday, February 7. Here is what you need to do and post to your blog:
-Go back to the artifact of your choice for your Rhetorical Analysis essay assignment. Observe the verbal and visual details in your artifact carefully and take notes on the significant features of the artifact from a dramatistic perspective. For this exercise, you may want to watch/observe your artifact several times. For example, if you are analyzing a video, watch it once, and then watch it again without sound, and then watch it again only with sound and no visuals. Check for the presence of a God/devil term. Identify the pentadic elements (agent, act, agency, scene, purpose); if you have already done so in your previous post, you might want to check again and confirm whether you have the right pentadic set (once you identify an agent, the other four terms should be based on that agent, etc). Also check for possible motives- transcendence, mortification, victimage.
-Brainstorm and do some freewriting about your artifact to flesh out ideas (for example, try to form full sentences about how a particular character's idea/behavior is justified by a certain pentadic-orientation or a certain motive, etc). This is meant to serve as an exploratory writing exercise-- don't worry about sentence structures, grammar, completeness of ideas, etc at this point. Just write.
-Go over your exploratory writing, and try to see the patterns in your artifact. Once you solidify some ideas, draft a tentative "outline" of your essay according to your thinking so far. Keep in mind that this outline can change as you complete a draft of the essay itself later-- so, do not limit your ideas by this outline. However, an outline will help you to put your ideas on paper, give some shape to them, and create an organizational structure.
-Based on your thinking and your points in your outline so far, draft an "introduction"-- see the tip/assignment sheet for reference about what needs to be in the introduction.
-Post your OUTLINE and INTRODUCTION to your blog by the deadline.
