Kayla Edwards 3/27

Today for class we continued learning about rhetorical analysis. We first reviewed SOAP and then talked about STone. An important thing to help differentiate between purpose and subject when doing a rhetorical analysis is that purpose is what the text does. So, the purpose is described using verbs. The subject is a thing that the text is talking about so it should be a noun. Tone is the attitude the author has about the subject. The best way to figure out the tone is to look at the diction used by the author. Diction is just a word that means the word choice used by the author. When talking about word choice it is important to know the difference between connotation and denotation. Denotation is the dictionary definition of a word. Connotation is the social perception of the word. To illustrate the difference between denotation and connotation we looked at the difference between the terms "jock" and "student athlete". Both jock and student athlete have the same denotation because they mean the same thing: a student that plays sports. However, student athlete has a more positive connotation because when you hear student athlete you think of a hard working athletic and smart kid. Jock on the other hand has a negative connotation because when you hear jock you think of a very strong person who has no brains. Next when identifying tone, instead of referring to the tone as positive or negative, you have to make it more specific. This can be done by thinking of more specific adjectives to describe the author's attitude about the text.