ASSIGNMENT: Individual Rhetorical Analysis of Web Site

Length: 750+ words

Assignment and Audience:
Your audience for this assignment is me, Betsy. The assignment is to write an individual paper (to be turned in with your group's web site) analyzing the visual and verbal choices your group made as you designed and developed the web site. Because the web site was a group project, I realize that many decisions may have been compromises. Therefore, in this paper, you have the opportunity to describe for me the way your brochure works for its audience to achieve its purpose, but in addition, you can describe visual and verbal choices you think might have been more effective—but were vetoed by your group. (This does not mean that the purpose of this paper is to complain about group work or decisions—only to explain why you felt some choices were effective and others might have been more effective.)

Purpose
Therefore, this assignment will serve several purposes:

• it will help you think critically about the rhetorical choices your group made in designing a document.
• it provides you with the opportunity to use the vocabulary of visual rhetoric that we have been discussing.
• it gives you the opportunity to disagree with decisions your group may have made or to support and explain your group's choices—but to show me what you know about researching and displaying information.

 Planning and Drafting
You'll want to review the material you complied on document and web design and compiling research before you begin this assignment because it will help you to quote from the book to support your assertions about effective choices, etc. In addition:

• you'll need to organize this assignment carefully. That means forecasting the topics you'll cover, chunking information, employing strong transitions between paragraphs, etc.
• choose just a few examples of verbal and visual choices to analyze so the paper doesn't become too large, but analyze those choices carefully, referring to specific choices made in your brochure.
• give yourself enough time to design this document so that it is not only verbally sound, but visually pleasing; you'll want to employ all those things we've been talking about, bulleted lists, headers, white space, etc.

Evaluation Criteria
Rhetorical analysis paper:

• incorporates specific evidence from texts (brochure, textbook, and lectures) to support your claims about what constitutes effective or not effective visual and verbal rhetorical choices for the rhetorical situation for which you are designing this document.
• is designed to help the reader make her way through complex information as easily as possible
• integrates the visual and verbal components effectively.
• shows care for written language appropriate to the intended audience.

Grading rubric for this assignment
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