AP English 11
Foundation and Rhetoric
Example 1:
1. What is it? (medium, genre, form, etc…)
2. What is the rhetorical situation? (That is—“speaker”, audience, purposes/aims)
3. What is the context—what larger debates does it engage?
4. What is the argument being presented?
Example 2:
1. What is it?
2. What is the rhetorical situation? (That is—“speaker”, audience, type/genre, purposes/aims)
3. What is the context—what larger debates does it engage?
4. What is the argument being presented?
The Syllabus question
How does this compare to other documents of this type?
What can you conclude about the speaker, the speaker’s relationship to the audience, and /or the speaker’s
relationship to the genre/document?
How does the speaker use this document to engage big debates in society?
What “tensions” exist among, within, and/or across these texts? How would these texts engage an
audience with their ideas?