Essay 3 Assignment: Analysis of Space
Description
In Essays 1 & 2 so far this semester, you’ve used writing to think about yourself, someone else, and one of the many cultures to which you belong, TCC. This essay will continue examining the world around you by asking you to write about a specific space that you’ve encountered. The spaces that people use and inhabit can often tell us a lot about those people’s behavior, values and interests, and by doing so can help us to better understand the world we live in. With this in mind, we will be thinking about some of the places that we encounter and how they influence our experiences, our ideas, our behaviors, and our culture. In writing about how spaces are designed to influence us, we’ll be developing our analytic skills and thinking rhetorically about the world around us and the situations we encounter every day.
Assignment
For this assignment, students will visit a specific, defined space of their choosing (a community service organization, a business, park, museum, campus, venue, specific area of town, etc.) and write about the experience of this visit. In a coherent, cohesive, and well-developed 3-5 page essay (approx. 1,000+ words), students will forward a clear, specific thesis about the place they visit and support that thesis with vivid and thoughtful analysis of the chosen space. The body of your essay should support your thesis through careful written analysis of the place’s parts.
Your thesis should make a clear claim about the space’s design and that claim should be supported by analysis of the space in the body of your essay. Use the following questions to help you generate a good thesis:
-How does the space make you feel? Why?
-What is this space designed to communicate to the people who inhabit/use it (information, emotion, argument, etc.)? And, how does it communicate that message?
-Is the space designed to influence your behavior or how you move through it and interact with it? How so and why?
Formal Requirements and Due Dates
All drafts and essays should be submitted to Blackboard by the due date. Essays should conform to MLA format and be typed, double-spaced, and no more than 12 pt. font (in a reasonable font). All files should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents (.doc or .docx). For further information on formatting and document design, see the MLA section of the Purdue OWL website (see syllabus) and the sample document template available in the Content section of our course Blackboard site.
Rough Drafts
Peer Review (25 points): Week 9 MY CLASS ____________
Submit drafts to Blackboard for Professor Review by 11:59 the night of your Peer Review (25 points)
Final Draft Due to Blackboard (100 points): 11:59 p.m. Friday, Oct 25
Rhetorical Précis 2 Assignment
Understanding Spaces Rhetorically
Description
You’ve done a Précis. Now you’re going to do it again, but this time you’ll be using it to help begin working on Essay 3. Rhetorician Lawrence J. Prelli contends that “the places we visit or inhabit embody in their physical structures and material ornaments symbolic inducements that work to dispose our attitudes, emotions, or sentiments” (9). In other words, the spaces we encounter are designed to impact us just like any other sort of composition. For this assignment, apply what you know about rhetorical situations to the space you want to analyze in Essay 3.
Assignment and Requirements
Identify the space you want to write about in Essay 3 and write a rhetorical précis about it. Your document should contain no more than 4 sentences that identify 1) who is responsible for the composition of the space and that composition’s rhetorical effect, 2) a brief summary of the design of the space, 3) a statement of why the space is designed the way it is, and 4) an identification of the space’s audience.
Example from a previous student:
The design of TCC’s Metro Campus suggests that attracting new students to TCC is more important than keeping current students here. By making sure that facilities and decorations on the first two floors of the Metro Campus Academic Building are state-of-the-art and in perfect condition, but allowing the floors above to become outdated and dingy, TCC demonstrates that its priorities are with appealing to new students and visitors, not current students and employees. The purpose of this design is to attract potential students in order to keep new money coming in. TCC keeps the bottom floors new and bright to appeal to students who are unsure what TCC has to offer in the hope of showing them that they can get a state-of-the-art education at TCC.
Use the resources available on Blackboard to help you with your rhetorical précis.
Due Date
Submit your Rhetorical Précis as a typed Microsoft Word document to Blackboard by 11:59 p.m. on Friday, October 11
Works Cited
Prelli, Lawrence J. “Rhetorics of Display: an Introduction.” Rhetorics of Display. Ed. Lawrence J. Prelli. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2006. 1-38. Print.