Critical Analysis of a Secondary Source

today's workshop was really informative. we focused on how to analyze a secondary source (in preparation for our next paper and our RAE). we first focused on the elements to look for within your source : author, rhetorical situation, claims, evidence and assumptions. Within each category we asked several questions trying to delve in deeper, such as after identifying the author, what do we know about him/her, their persona, and how this effect their relationship with and portrayal of their topic. After establishing this basic structure we used an example. The example "real and hyperreal campus architecture favors faux over the original", allowed us to take these theoretical ideas and use them. While the independent reading was helpful, it was in our discussion of this piece that i got most out of this workshop. He really stressed finding supporting evidence to the claims... evidence found verbatim in the text. after noting these claims and examples, we were able to deduce certain unspoken implications that showed us about his "persona" (including his biases). Finally, we looked at the three ways to respond to sources : no, because; yes, but; yes, and. These concrete examples nicely tied together the information from the session. Overall, I think this workshop helped me understand the steps that I have already taken in past papers and broken them apart so that I am able to see everything little thing I am doing (and seeing where I am lacking or where I am not grasping the point)... so i think for the paper i will be able to find more concrete examples and create claims about why she is saying it and how her rhetoric affects the content.