Lit Review for Critical Rhetoric
Lit review guidelines
Topic: Choose a rhetorical theory or method (or set of interlocking methods) that you think you might want to work with (and possibly critique or extend) in your seminar paper.
The purpose of the assignment: To provide some of the theoretical/methodological foundation upon which you will build your final course paper.
Because we are not studying any method in detail (going instead for breadth of coverage in this course), you will need to research any method or tool of rhetoric that you plan to use in your paper.
Note that the lit review is primarily designed to cover your method/perspective. You will need to do additional research for the seminar paper.
While you may not be able to paste your lit review paper directly into your seminar paper, you should be able to draw extensively on the research you’ve done for the lit review when researching and writing your seminar paper.
Lit reviews are NOT annotated bibs. A lit review is an essay that synthesizes outside research and critically assesses it from the perspective of a research question.
From the course syllabus:
The lit review assignment is designed to encourage you to explore one tool, method, or question of rhetorical criticism in more detail. For example, say you’re interested in using narrative criticism in your final seminar paper. For your lit review, you might choose to focus on narrative criticism or some aspect of narrative criticism. The sources for your lit review should be drawn exclusively from peer-reviewed, academic journals. The lit review should synthesize and critically assess the sources from the perspective of a question of interest. Additional requirements: 2000-2250 words, 8-10 peer-reviewed articles discussed in the lit review, at least half of the articles discussed in the review are no older than five years, appropriate citation style is used consistently throughout (MLA or APA).