Jan -

On my second assignment over the summer, I included an option to write an analysis of a web site. It wasn't a rhetorical analysis assignment - the prompt was for an evaluative argument. However, since I asked them to evaluate its rhetorical effectiveness, the papers were closely akin to rhetorical analysis.

Here's the text of the assignment.

Pick a web site that advocates a particular point of view. For example, the RIAA web site, the White House web site, the PETA website, an online essay, and so on. I leave the exact topic to you – pick an issue that interests you. Write a paper evaluating the effectiveness of the web site. Some questions you’ll need to ask yourself during the process of writing this paper include:

• Who is its intended audience? Is there any one group it was written mostly to target?
• What does the site argue for?
• How does it go about it?
• How effectively does it address its intended audience?
• What makes a web site good?
• What makes a web site bad?
• If the page has illustrations or images included, do they work with the text to make the argument? How so?

Make sure that you figure out what criteria you’re judging the web site by, and clearly state them in your paper.

It worked reasonably well. I got two really excellent papers out of this, notably one evaluating Rolling Stone's claim that Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was the greatest album of all time. It was interesting to read an evaluation of an evaluation. The other papers were reasonably good.

One caveat - if there are any issues that you'd rather not read about, specify them in the prompt! In past I had specified that I didn't want papers on abortion; it's such a polarized issue that it's exceptionally difficult for the students to establish critical distance. This time, however, I forgot to specify that, and two students chose to analyze Abort73.com, an immensely sophisticated pro-life site. One student appeared to be pro-life, the other pro-choice; both made a tangible and mostly successful effort to put aside their own feelings on the matter in the course of their analyses.

In fact, the first drafts of both the abortion papers suffered from an identical problem - they tried to do too much. The site they were analyzing consists of well over 200 pages of information, and both tried to evaluate everything in the entire site in one five-page swoop, which led to papers that were too vague to say anything interesting.

If you adapt this assignment, therefore, I have two suggestions:

1. Require your students to get your approval for the sites that they choose so that you can nix ones that you deem unworkable or unsuitable for some reason.
2. Stress to them the importance of identifying one particular aspect or one particular page of the site to focus on in their paper.

The "one particular aspect" doesn't need to be textual. One student wrote a good paper analyzing only the graphics present on the main page of KentuckyFriedCruelty.com, and another one (who wrote a bland and vague first draft about the entire PETA web site) turned in a good revision doing a detailed analysis of one of PETA's videos. In other cases (like the Beatle's album evaluation), the student did a more traditional textual analysis focusing on an article contained within a larger web site. Having a small, specific target for the analysis helps a great deal.

If you're interested, I could ask my students for permission to show you their papers. I've been thinking of asking them for permission anyway, since I like to have lots of sample papers on hand.