40 Signal Phrases
A signal phrase, also known as an attributive tag, is a device used to smoothly integrate quotations and paraphrases into your essay. It is important to use signal phrases to clearly attribute supporting evidence to an author and to avoid interrupting the flow of an essay. Signal phrases can also be used as meaningful transitions, moving your readers between your ideas and those of your sources.
A basic signal phrase consists of an author’s name and an active verb indicating how the author is presenting the material. A signal phrase may also include information explaining an author’s credentials and/or affiliations as well as the title and/or publisher of the source text.
Referring to the Author within a Signal Phrase
In many instances, a signal phrase should contain only the last name of the author or authors of the source text (as opposed to the author’s first and last name). For instance, APA style guidelines require no reference to an author’s first name at any point in an essay and few if any gender-specific pronouns. But in MLA papers, if you are referring to an author for the first time in your essay, you should include that author’s first name (you might also want to include the author’s credentials and the title of the source—see “Types of Signal Phrases” below). Any future should refer to the author by last name only or with a pronoun when it’s perfectly clear to whom that pronoun refers. Consider the following examples:
- Michael Pollan observes that “Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago” (29).
- Pollan continues, “But the national conversation unfolding around the subject of food and farming really began in the 1970s” (29).
- He then specifies, “I would argue that the conversation got under way in earnest in 1971, when [Wendell] Berry published an article in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue” (29).
Notice how each signal phrase verb is followed by a comma (or the word “that”), which is then followed by one space before the opening quotation mark.
In essays written according to MLA and APA guidelines, it is acceptable to refer to the author as “the author” as long as it is perfectly clear to whom you are referring. In APA, it is common to see general references to “researchers.”
Signal Phrase Verb Tense
In the examples above, notice how the signal phrase verbs are written in present tense. When you are asked to write a paper that follows MLA guidelines, signal phrases should always be written in present (not past) tense. When writing a paper using APA style, signal phrase verbs should be written in past tense. Consider the following example:
- Pollan (2009) observed that “Americans today are having a national conversation about food and agriculture that would have been impossible to imagine even a few short years ago” (p. 29).
Notice how APA in-text citations also differ from MLA style in that APA citations include the year of publication and the page number is preceded by a “p.”
Varying Your Verbs
You should also vary your signal phrase verbs (rather than simply using “states” throughout your entire essay) in order to maintain your readers’ interest and to indicate the author’s intended use of the excerpted material. See below for examples of strong signal phrase verbs.
Types of Signal Phrases
In most instances, the first time the author is mentioned in an MLA-style essay, as well as including the author’s first and last name in a signal phrase, it is also a good idea to include the author’s credentials and the title of the source.
While providing the author’s credentials and title of the source are the most common types of signal phrases, there are others we should be aware of. In the examples below, the information relevant to the type of signal phrase is underlined.
Type: Author’s credentials are indicated.
Example: Grace Chapmen, Curator of Human Health & Evolutionary Medicine at the Springfield Natural History Museum, explains…
Purpose: Presenting an author’s credentials should help build credibility for the passage you are about to present. Including the author’s credentials gives your readers a reason to consider your sources.
Type: Author’s lack of credentials is indicated.
Example: Matthew Spencer, whose background is in marriage counseling, not foreign policy, claims…
Purpose: Identifying an author’s lack of credentials in a given area can help illustrate a lack of authority on the subject matter and persuade the audience not to adopt the author’s ideas. Pointing to an author’s lack of credentials can be beneficial when developing your response to counter-arguments.
Type: Author’s social or political stance, if necessary to the content, is explained.
Example: Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, Roland Hayes, prominent civil rights activist, preaches…
Ralph Spencer, who has ties to the White Nationalist movement, denies…
Purpose: Explaining the author’s social or political stance can help a reader to understand why that author expresses a particular view. This understanding can positively or negatively influence an audience. Be careful to avoid engaging in logical fallacies such as loaded language.
Type: Publisher of the source is identified.
Example: According to a recent CNN poll…
Purpose: Identifying the publisher of the passage can help reinforce the credibility of the information presented and you can capitalize on the reputation/ credibility of the publisher of the source material.
Type: Title of the Source is included.
Example: In “Understanding Human Behavior,” Riley argues …
Purpose: Informs the reader where the cited passage is being pulled from.
Type: Information that establishes context is presented.
Example: In a speech presented during a Free Speech rally, Elaine Wallace encourages …
Purpose: Presenting the context that the original information was presented can help the audience understand the author’s purpose more clearly.
MLA Signal Phrase Verbs
| Acknowledges | Counters | Notes |
| Admits | Declares | Observes |
| Agrees | Denies | Points out |
| Argues | Disputes | Reasons |
| Asserts | Emphasizes | Refutes |
| Believes | Finds | Rejects |
| Claims | Illustrates | Reports |
| Compares | Implies | Responds |
| Confirms | Insists | Suggests |
| Comments | Maintains | Thinks |
| Contends | Mentions | Writes |
APA Signal Phrase Verbs
| Acknowledged | Countered | Noted |
| Admitted | Declared | Observed |
| Agreed | Denied | Pointed out |
| Argued | Disputed | Reasoned |
| Asserted | Emphasized | Refuted |
| Believed | Found | Rejected |
| Claimed | Illustrated | Reported |
| Compared | Implied | Responded |
| Confirmed | Insisted | Suggested |
| Commented | Maintained | Thought |
| Contended | Mentioned | Wrote |
Appendix B offers you some additional assistance with reading sources, integrating evidence, and paragraph development.
In “Troubleshooting: Body Paragraph Development,” John Lanning and Sarah M. Lacy give directions for how to better develop body paragraphs.
“Reading Popular Sources,” by Melanie Gagich and Emilie Zickel, discusses types of popular sources and how to read and evaluate them.
Svetlana Zhuravlova, in “Additional Synthesis Examples,” provides tips on how to synthesize.
Melanie Gagich and Emilie Zickel discuss reading and evaluating tips for scholarly sources in “Reading Academic Sources.”
In “Signal Phrases,” John Lanning and Amanda Lloyd, explain signal phrases in detail and offer examples.
Robin Jeffrey and Melanie Gagich share tips on when to summarize, when to paraphrase, and when to quote, as well as rules for each, in “Paraphrasing, Summarizing, and Quoting.”
In Appendix B: Writing and Research Skills, targeted objectives are Composing Processes, Reading, and Information Literacy. Chapters 55, 57, 59, 60, and 61 all address the mechanics of integrating research and writing development at the sentence and paragraph level (Composing Processes). And, in Chapters 56 and 58—both of which target source evaluations, readers will learn about the nuances of cultivating writing and research skills for first-year writing (Reading and Information Literacy).
Abstract
"There is One Correct Way of Writing and Speaking" by Anjali Pattanayak comes from Bad Ideas About Writing, edited by Cheryl E. Ball and Drew M. Loewe. This article focuses on the myth that there is only one way to read and write successfully in our world. Pattanayak dispels this position by speaking to the ways in which holding tightly to such beliefs can limit writing diversity and further marginalize those who have specific cultural linguistic styles that connect deeply with their identity.
This reading is available below, as a PDF, and as a podcast.
People consistently lament that kids today can’t speak properly or that people coming to this country need to learn to write correctly. These lamentations are based on the notion that there is a single correct way of speaking and writing. Currently, the general sentiment is that people should just learn to speak and write proper English. This understanding of writing is rooted called current traditional rhetoric, which focuses on a prescriptive and formulaic way of teaching writing that assumes there is only one way to write (or speak) something for it to be correct. However, over the past several decades, scholars in writing studies have examined the ways in which writing has a close dialectical relationship with identity, style genre, and culture. In other words, the rules for writing shift with the people and the community involved as well as the purpose and type of writing.
Most people implicitly understand that the way they communicate changes with different groups of people, from bosses to work colleagues to peers to relatives. They understand that conversations that may be appropriate over a private dinner may not be appropriate at the workplace. These conversational shifts might be subtle, but they are distinct. While most people accept and understand these nuances exist and will adapt to these unspoken rules— and while we have all committed a social faux pas when we didn’t understand these unspoken rules—we do not often afford this same benefit of the doubt to people who are new to our communities or who are learning our unspoken rules.
While the idea of arguing whether there is one correct way of communicating or whether writing is culturally situated might seem to be a pedantic exercise, the reality is that espousing the ideology that there is one correct way to speak and write disenfranchises many populations who are already denigrated by society. The writing most valued in this binary is a type of writing that is situated in middle-class white culture. In adhering to so-called correct language, we are devaluing the non-standard dialects, cultures, and therefore identities of people and their communicative situations that do not fit a highly limited mold.
The way in which correctness in language devalues people is already troubling, but it becomes exacerbated by the current trends in education. Please refer to the literary crisis chapter to learn more about the changing dynamics in education. Given this shift and the way that Standard Written English is deeply rooted in white upper/middle-class culture, we see more and more students from diverse backgrounds gaining access to college who are facing barriers due to their linguistic backgrounds.
This means that while minority students and lower class students are ostensibly being given greater access to education, careers, and other facets of society they had been previously barred from, they are still facing serious barriers that their upper-class white counterparts do not, particularly in terms of culture, language, and literacy. J. Elspeth Stuckey argues that literacy, rather than enfranchising students, is a means of oppression and that it does little to help the economic futures of minority students because of how literacy teaches a particular set of values—ways of communicating and identity. In the context of educational settings, the cultures and identities of academia are valued more than those of the students, which sends the message that how they, their family, and members in their community speak and act are wrong by comparison. In essence, it sends the message starting at a very young age that who they are and where they come from is somehow lesser.
In this sense, education, while well intentioned, serves to further the marginalization of certain identities and cultures that do not fit. This is particularly evident in Latino, African American, and English as Second Language communities. In the book Paying for the Party, Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton note that colleges like the school they studied for five years, which they call Midwestern University, do not help facilitate social mobility. Frequently, the students who entered college best prepared were those who were already middle or upper class, meaning the opportunities the working-and lower-class students received were more limited. When you look at this alongside what Gloria Ladson-Billings calls the educational debt, or the compounded impact of educational deficits that grow across generations of poor minority students, literacy efforts as they are currently framed paint a bleak picture for poor, minority students.
The issue is not just one of unequal access to opportunities. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Carmen Kynard illustrate how attitudes toward students as writers are interwoven with attitudes toward them as people. Language cannot be disassociated from people, which has important consequences for those who grow up speaking different dialects. By continuing to propagate the notion of correct and incorrect ways of speaking, we effectively devalue the intelligence and character of students, employees, and colleagues, who, for whatever reasons, don’t speak or write what in historical terms has been called the King’s English (among other names). We use the perception of improper communication as evidence of others’ lesser character or ability, despite recognizing that this country was united (if only in name) after declaring independence from that King.
This perception becomes all the more problematic because it is not just about devaluing individuals, but about the widespread practice of devaluing the literate practices of those who are already marginalized. David Gold highlights the marginalization of women, working class, rural, and African American literacy in our understanding of writing. Gold writes about how the literacy practices of African Americans in universities laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, the schools he studied were decades ahead of the larger national conversation on how literacy, identity, and power were interrelated. In her work examining how literacy and identity formation were key for African American women and for social change, Jacqueline Jones Royster discusses the importance of understanding the these cultural, identity, and social movements, echoing the impact marginalized scholars had in academia. Both demonstrate the detrimental impact of sidelining groups of people and their literate practices by devaluing their languages and their experiences, not just for those who are marginalized but for our larger understanding of how we as a society write.
The notion of one correct way of writing is also troubling because it operates under the assumption that linguistic differences are the result of error. The reality is that, for many speakers, what we might perceive as a mistake is actually a system of difference. One notable example of a different dialect of English is Ebonics, which has different patterns of speech rooted in the ancestral heritage of its speakers. Similarly, immigrant groups will frequently speak and write English in a way that mirrors the linguistic heritage of their mother tongue.
The way that we conceptualize language is not just detrimental to minorities; it also devalues the identities that working- and lower-class people bring to communicative situations, including the classroom. Lynn Z. Bloom writes that “Freshman Composition is an unabashedly middle-class enterprise.” She argues that one of the reasons composition is required for all students is because it promulgates middle-class values and ways of thinking. These values in the writing classroom are embodied in everything from the notion of property, which undergirds the way that plagiarism and intellectual property are treated, to formality of language and rhetorical choices that are encouraged in papers. Indeed, the way many instructors teach writing, plagiarism, citation, and word choice in papers is not in and of itself good but rather is the socially accepted way of interacting with text as defined by the middle class. Mike Rose and Irvin Peckham write about the tension of middle-class values on working-class students and the cognitive dissonance and struggles with identity that come with imposing such values in writing under the guise of correctness. The idea that there is one correct way of writing devalues the writing, thoughts, intelligence, and identities of people from lower-class backgrounds.
Pragmatically, many argue that standard English should be dominant in the binary between academic English and all other dialects in order for speakers and writers to communicate with credibility in their communities. This argument has been used to justify the continued attention to correctness at the expense of authors’ voices, but we can teach people to adapt while also valuing their identities. We can talk about writing as something that they can employ to their benefit rather than a hegemonic standard that supersedes their backgrounds, identities, and experiences.
In order to value the diversity of communication and identities that exist in the U.S., we need to start teaching and envisioning writing as a cultural and social activity. We need a more nuanced view of writing in society that encourages everyone to adapt to their audiences and contexts rather than placing an undue burden on those who do not fit the mold of standard English. One strategy for teaching academic English without devaluing a writer’s identity is code-switching, a concept already taught in schools with significant minority populations as a way of empowering young people. While instruction in code-switching is valuable because it teaches students that they can adopt different linguistic choices to appeal to different audiences, it is deeply problematic that the impetus is still placed on minority students with non-standard dialects to adapt. While code-switching is meant to empower people, it is still rooted in the mentality that there is one correct way of writing, because even as code-switching teaches an incredibly nuanced way of thinking about writing, it is still being taught in the context of preparing writers to deal with a society that will use errors in speak- ing as evidence that they are lesser. As a result, it is a less-than-ideal solution because it plays into—rather than undermines—the racism of academic English.
By perpetuating the myth of one correct way of writing, we are effectively marginalizing substantial swaths of the population linguistically and culturally. The first step in combating this is as easy as recognizing how correctness reinforces inequality and affects our own perceptions of people and questioning our assumptions about communication, and a second step is valuing code-switching in a wide swath of communicative situations.
Further Reading
While the notion of what constitutes academic English has remained relatively static in popular culture, the reality of writing in the university has broadened to include many other types of writing. Patricia Bizzell, Helen Fox, and Christopher Shroeder compile arguments for addressing these other types of communication in Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy. In College Writing and Beyond, Anne Beaufort provides a framework in which to understand how writing is dynamic. In her article “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise,” Lynn Z. Bloom articulates the ways in which the cultural values of the middle class are being taught in the writing classroom as objectively good or true and the impact of this mentality. Additionally, Asao Inoue compiles a collection of articles in Race and Writing Assessment that provides frameworks for considering race in assessment practices.
In 1974, the Conference for College Composition and Communication passed the resolution Students’ Right to Their Own Language. In this time since it passed, there has been a great deal of discussion around the wisdom of that resolution. Editors Austin Jackson, David E. Kirkland, and Staci Perryman-Clark compile short articles for and against the resolution called “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.”
Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur write about how the increasing number of English speakers in the world is increasing linguistic diversity in “Opinion: Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach.” Additionally, Irvin Peckham writes extensively with a focus on working class students in the classroom and the impact of college and academic writing as a middle-class enterprise in “The Stories We Tell.” For more on the history and cultural development of African American Vernacular English, consider Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice by John Baugh.
Keywords
African American Vernacular, cultural rhetorics, Ebonics, non-standard dialect, rhetorical genre studies, writing, class
Author Bio
Anjali Pattanayak is the Academic Enrichment program coordinator for the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Platteville. She currently runs programs that help underrepresented students transition into their first year
of college to support retention and matriculation. She has spent over five years doing outreach work with under-represented youth
as they transition to college. She has taught both first-year composition and first-year experience classes. You can follow her @
lalaithfeanaro or @arpattanayak.
Section Overview
The chapters in this section invite you to consider composition in rhetorical terms. We take a flexible, rhetorical approach to understanding writing because there are no fixed, universal rules for writing. This doesn't mean that there aren't any rules. Instead, effective writing is contextual, and your relative success as a writer is dependent on your ability to understand how to craft appropriate compositions across situations, whether you're writing in your composition class, in your selected major, in your professional life, or in your personal life. You have likely already learned a lot about composition and rhetoric, although you may not have used some of the language we'll introduce. We invite you to build on your existing knowledge and add tools to your toolbox in the form of new questions you'll ask about writing situations, new understandings of how to organize writing effectively, and new ways of developing and filtering knowledge.
Many of the readings in this book, and certainly in this section include chapters from the book, Bad Ideas About Writing. It is important to note that Bad Ideas About Writing includes titles that can be misleading if you do not read the text itself. The titles for all of the Bad Ideas About Writing essays are actually misleading myths about writing that circulate. It may be confusing, at first, to see these titles. And it is important to keep in mind the content of each essay dispels these popular beliefs about writing that can be found in the titles, by using research from the field. Happily, there are both written and audio versions available for each of these brief, engaging chapters.
The first three chapters in this section address the relationship between rhetoric and first-year writing as well as the purpose of first-year writing in education:
- Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech by Patricia Roberts-Miller (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
- First-Year Composition Prepares Students for Academic Writing by Tyler S. Branson (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
- First-Year Composition Should be Skipped by Paul G. Cook (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
The next three chapters consider the relationship between reading and writing:
- “Developing a Repertoire of Reading Strategies” by Ellen C. Carillo
- Reading and Writing Are Not Connected by Ellen C. Carillo (Bad Ideas About Writing) (Podcast)
- How to Read Like a Writer by Michael Bunn
To provide a foundation for this work, consider how rhetorical analysis is always at work in communication. Whenever we speak, write, or listen, we're doing rhetorical work. By beginning our considerations of the rhetorical nature of communication with a focus on "Rhetorical Analysis" (below), we invite you to apply these skills throughout your work this semester. The following text, "Rhetorical Analysis," is an excerpt from Try This: Research Methods For Writers, (pp. 79-82) by Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Derek Mueller, and Kate Pantelides.
Rhetorical analysis helps demonstrate the significance of a text by carefully considering the rhetorical situation in which it develops and the ways that it supports its purpose. There are lots of definitions of rhetoric, and the definition that makes the
most sense to you and your understanding of communication will impact how you deploy rhetorical analysis. The following are a few definitions of rhetoric:
- Ancient Greek rhetor Aristotle: “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
- British rhetorician I. A. Richards: “Rhetoric…should be a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (3).
- Contemporary American rhetors Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs: “Rhetoric is a field of study in which people examine how persuasion and communication work, and it is also the art of human interaction, communication, and persuasion” (366).
- Contemporary American genre theorist Charles Bazerman: “The study of how people use language and other symbols to realize human goals and carry out human activities. . . . ultimately a practical study offering people greater control over their symbolic activity” (6).
Try This: Defining Rhetoric (30 minutes)
Find a few alternative definitions of rhetoric on your own, and see which one is most appealing to you. Now, mush them together, paraphrase, and come up with a definition that resonates with your understanding of rhetoric.
Rhetorical analysis helps us understand the various components that make a communicative act/artifact successful or not. A key component to effective rhetorical analysis is careful, active attention to what the author and her text are trying to accomplish. Krista Ratcliffe calls such attention rhetorical listening.
Most people summarize rhetorical listening as an orientation of active openness toward communication, and Ratcliffe identifies multiple components for such a stance:
- “acknowledging the existence” of the other, their self, and discourse;
- listening for "(un)conscious presences, absences, and unknowns”;
- and purposefully “integrating this information into our world views and decision making.” (29)
Rhetorical listening often draws our attention to absences. Jacqueline Jones Royster’s work on literacy practices, particularly of nineteenth century Black women, demonstrates how listening for and being curious about absences often leads us to understudied rhetors. Temptaous McCoy has coined the term amplification rhetorics (AR), a method of seeking out and amplifying rhetorical practices that may not have been effectively heard. She describes AR as a way of examining and celebrating the experiences and community rhetorics of Black and marginalized communities.
Try This: Analyzing Keywords (60 minutes)
Working with something you have recently written, assign keywords (one or two-word phrases) you believe would do well to convey its significance (don’t count, just consider what you think is most important about the text). To do so, follow these steps:
- Identify five to seven keywords based on your sense of the text.
- Then, turn to a keyword generating tool, such as TagCrowd (tagcrowd.com) or the NGram Analyzer (guidetodatamining.com/ngramAnalyzer/). Copy and paste your writing into the platform and initiate the analysis with the aid of the keyword generating tool. Which words or phrases match (as in, you thought they were significant and they show up frequently in your text)? Which words or phrases appear in one list but not the other? What do you think explains the differences in the lists?
- Next, identify two keywords or phrases you believe are not sufficiently represented in either list. What are these keywords or phrases, and how are they significant to the work you are doing? Develop a one-page revision memo that accounts for how you could go about expanding the presence of these underrepresented words or phrases in your writing.
Another way of thinking of rhetorical listening in the context of texts is Peter Elbow’s practice of “The Believing Game,” in which he encourages audience members to suspend potential disbelief or critique of
a text. Instead of starting with critique, he works to step into the authors’ shoes and actually believe whatever they are suggesting. Complimentary to this practice is Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s formulation of invitational rhetoric. They offer invitational rhetoric as counter to understandings of rhetoric as primarily about persuasion, like Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric. They see persuasion as ultimately about power, whereas invitational rhetoric instead works to develop equitable relationships. Like rhetorical listening, invitational rhetoric is a method for establishing understanding within relationships. They define such work as “an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and see it as the rhetor does” (5). Although these approaches all differ, what they have in common is using rhetorical awareness to invite understanding rather than arguing for one’s own point of view or “winning” an argument.
Try This: Rhetorical Analysis (60 minutes)
Practice rhetorical analysis. Select an article that interests you, perhaps one that you identified to work with in Chapter 3 or something you came across when you searched for potential corpora at the beginning of this chapter. Spend some time considering why this article is persuasive or appealing to you. The following questions may aid your consideration:
- Who is the audience? What evidence suggests this audience?
- What is the context in which it was written? What evidence suggests this?
- What is its purpose? You might also identify the thesis or orienting principle and consider the larger relationship between the work’s purpose and its stated argument or principle. What evidence leads you to this finding?
- Who is the author? Really—who is the author? Draw on your worknet findings (see Try This for a discussion of worknets) and consider the author’s relationship to this rhetorical situation. What is the exigency, or reason, for writing this work? Or, you might return to considering the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of this article.
There are many ways to practice rhetorical analysis, although it is often reduced to an equation rather than a tool for discovery of a text. Let rhetorical analysis be a method that opens up understanding and possibility rather than one that simply labels certain words or passages. Consider how identifying a particular rhetorical appeal adds depth and nuance to a text and connects you to it in complex ways. For instance, the previous “Try This” offered two approaches to rhetorical analysis. The next “Try This” offers two additional approaches. Consider which one resonates most with you. Which method helps you identify the significance and interest of a text?
Try This: More Rhetorical Analysis (60 minutes)
Working with a text/genre/corpus of your choosing, develop responses to the following prompt. If you seek a text as the basis of your analysis, we recommend Captain Brett Crozier’s letter to shipmates aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak.
In what ways does the author offer specific appeals to the audience? Consider particular instances of the following appeals in the text:
- Kairos, which refers to timeliness—indications of why the text is contemporarily relevant
- Ethos, which generally concerns the relative credibility of an author or argument
- Logos, which means demonstrating specific pieces of evidence that support the text’s purpose
- Pathos, which relates to engaging the emotions
Practice rhetorical listening. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is not here? Are there any notable absences? Things/people/ideas the author does not mention?
- Are there ideas or appeals that potentially challenge your acceptance of the author’s work?
Although we have asked you to identify individual appeals, such rhetorical tools usually work together, and it can be hard to pull them apart. In identifying the various rhetorical components of a text, consider how they collaborate to make a text successful and persuasive . . . or not.
