Assignment Four  Twitter Analysis

In this assignment, you'll work with a partner (or two) to analyze the rhetorical tactics that a number of different writers make in posting about a contemporary controversy on Twitter. You use the knowledge of rhetorical tactics you gained while working on the ad essay (and can include some of those sources), and read new material that analyzes the rhetoric of various Twitter users.

You and your partner(s) will need to choose a hashtag to follow, and then start picking out individual tweets that do (not SAY, DO) interesting things to the audience, keeping in mind each individual writer's purpose in posting each tweet, as well as the audience, context, subject, and persona in this particular rhetorical situation. The point of your collaborative analysis will be to figure out who really succeeds in reaching their rhetorical goals in this situation, and why they succeed -- so that you yourself have a better chance of succeeding in the hundreds of millions of rhetorical situations that you will encounter in the future.

Then, once you've analyzed how other people communicate within this hashtag/conversation, you yourself will post to the hashtag, attempting to succeed yourself.

Your final draft paper will include: 1) rhetorical analysis of individual Tweets; 2) discussion of who succeeds in the conversation and why; 3) a plan of how you plan to tweet within the conversation; 4) the actual tweets you post and their results: Did you get a lot of likes and retweets? Did you not? What do you think accounts for this?

Your final draft should be six double spaced pages (1500 words) long or more, not counting the inserted screencaps of the tweets you are analyzing. If you have two partners, your final draft should be nine double spaced pages (2250 words) long or more, not counting the inserted screencaps of the tweets you are analyzing. 

A fuller set of suggestions for your process in this paper is here.

The scoring guide for this paper is here.

Schedule

10/25      Complete Project 3. Rhetorical Situation Analysis. A Taxonomy of Trump Tweets. Finding tweets to follow for Project #2 -- examples: DACA, Black Lives Matter, Trump's Russian Connections, Resist, The Resistance. HOMEWORK: Read this assignment sheet, Read Rhetorical Analysis of Donald J. Trump. Take notes on this material.

10/30      Meet in Computer Lab. Start reading tweets under your hashtag, and  taking notes about them, consulting 1) the Procedures for Project #2 sheet, 2) the readings we've been doing about Twitter, including the Trump readings above, and 3) the Rhetorical Analysis Notes and Questions. HOMEWORK: Read I shared my toddler's hospital bill on Twitter. Take notes on this material. Read the assignment sheet for Project 6. 

11/1        Meet in Computer Lab. Continue reading/analyzing tweets. Read "AT&T vs. T-Mobile on Twitter" and do a double entry journal on it. Here are Cauthen's notes on this article, which was written to an audience you're not really part of yet. Pay particular attention to what the writer says about the rhetorical situation of Twitter in general, and specific rhetorical moves Twitter writers make. Take notes.

11/6        Meet in Computer Lab. Continue reading/analyzing tweets. HOMEWORK: Read Examples of good answers for Project #2.

11/8        Meet in classroom. Discussion of sample answers for Project #2, brainstorming on practice prompts. Revisions of Project #2 (first practice Comp Co-op) due. HOMEWORK: Read Kairos of Twitter for Rhetoric Studies. Take notes.

11/13      Project 5 (2nd Practice Comp Co-op), Part 1

 

11/15      Project 5, Part 2

 

11/20      Meet in Computer Lab. Continue reading/analyzing tweets.

 

11/22      Conferences (OPTIONAL) in the classroom. First come first served.

11/27      Comp Co-op, Part 1

11/29      Comp Co-op, Part 2

               Project 4 due