Magazine Assignment Evaluation

These are the questions that I will ask myself as I look to give your articles advisory grades next week. These are the only elements on which I will base your grades:

• Appropriate Use of Style—Does your article adopt the written stylistic conventions of your forum? Would it make a natural fit within the pages of the magazine? Style applies to several things:
  • Written Style—Is your article serious or fun, personal or impersonal, conversational or formal, etc. in a way that is consistent with the forum and audience addressed?
  • Textual Features—Does your article have some of the basic structural features typically found in your forum, such as titles, headings, headlines, bylines, etc.? Is your article organized consistently with other articles in that forum? Are the paragraphs of comparable lengths?
  • Citation Style—Does your article attribute quotes and outside information in a way that is consistent with your forum?
  • Editorial Style—Does the article use the same conventions of grammar, spelling, and mechanics as your chosen forum?
• Appropriate Construction of Ethos—Does your article take the appropriate steps to construct your ethos? Do you establish your character and expertise is a way that is natural and convincing to the audience, and in a way that will ultimately allow you to communicate with that audience?
• Rhetorical Appropriateness—Are your message, purpose, forum, and audience ultimately compatible? Have you presented an argument with realistic aims in light of the audience you have selected? Do you phrase your arguments in a way that is convincing to the audience using modes of persuasion that are familiar to them? Ultimately, are your arguments likely to be effective?

Self-Reflexive Essay

For Friday, in addition to your revised draft, I want you to bring in a 250–500 word essay explaining the rhetorical choices that you made while writing your article, including a brief description of the strategy behind them. The audience that you are addressing in this essay is me. You can use the above outline as a guide for what to look at in this essay, but this is not about jockeying for a grade. Rather, I need you to explain your decisions in order that I can determine how and why they meet the criteria of “appropriateness” that I’ve outlined above. In addition, please mark the changes that you have made on your revised article draft with a highlighter.