Rhetorical Analysis #1

Rhetorical Analysis 1: For this brief analysis, you will choose your own example of the kinds of texts we have examined together and apply the tools you have learned to identify the purposes and audiences of that text and explain the ways that the author attempts to accomplish those purposes.

Text: “Please Don’t Feed the Bears” by Paul Rogers in the San Jose Mercury News 9/14/2014

Audience: The audience for this article includes people that read the San Jose Mercury News regularly, people that visit Yosemite, people that are afraid of wild animal attacks, and since it was the front-page story, people that may walk by a newsstand (thus, it should be more eye-catching in terms in title and content). 

Purpose: The purpose of the article is to provide audience awareness of both the history of bears (emphasizing the damage they cause) and bear management in Yosemite as well as strategies and techniques that campers can use to avoid encounters with said bears. 

Method: The author uses an interesting strategy of personifying the bears in Yosemite by giving them human traits such as describing them as “breaking into cars” and calling them “marauders.”  He begins the article using these terms to not only to make the bears seem more human, but to make the bears seem like evil humans.  The author does this in order to establish a problem: evil bears in Yosemite.  According to M. Jimmie Killingsworth, this would be an appeal to the body in two ways: first, giving human qualities to a non-human entity, and second, by dehumanizing said entity.  In addition, calling bears “marauders” is an appeal to tropes since the author is making a comparison between two things without using “like” or “as.”  He uses this metaphor in order to add more description to his perceived attitude of the bears.  Then, he offers a solution to the bear problem.

              The next section of the article details a history of black bears in Yosemite, the amount of damage done over the years (both monetary and human casualty), and measures that the park rangers have implemented to stem the tide of bears causing damage.  This is an appeal to time as well as an appeal to evidence and authority.  The appeals come in the form of the statistics of bear damage to property and casualties due to bears from 1980 to today.  The appeal to time claims that the bear situation is getting better over time, and the appeal to evidence stems from the inclusion of numerical facts in the form of bar graphs.  The article appeals to authority by detailing the actions that park rangers, experts in their field, have implemented to help prevent bear encounters.  Subtly, the article also makes an appeal to place; the article does not claim that people or bears should leave Yosemite.  Instead, the author implies that this place, Yosemite, is a place that can be shared by both people and bears alike in a harmonious manner.  Thus, the author advocates for a shared space.

              In the final section, the article addresses what steps campers can take to avoid contact with a bear.  This is another appeal to the body because the author assumes that all of his readers have bodies as well as all of those people would like to keep their bodies free from bear injury.  Thus, sharing safety tips appeals to people’s love for their body.