Rhetorical Analysis of Student Writing - Essay Example

The audience for this writing is likely to be officials and administrators in the police and judicial system, and also victims, accused individuals and their lawyers, all of whom will want to analyse it very carefully and perhaps even challenge some of it with alternative views. It takes the form of a report. This genre is characterised by facts and figures, including the case number, my own name and number, page numbers and the penal code number, all of which are present on each separate page.

This repetition is quite tedious but it is an important security measure to ensure that if any pages become detached from the set, this can be identified quickly and they can be easily matched up with the rest. This measure also ensures that no one can slip extra pages into the narrative at a later date for any purpose. The three main rhetorical techniques used in this text are narrative, description, and division. Narrative writing makes use of verbs because it tells what is happening or has happened.

These verbs often show motion or change of state, or some important and dynamic action. In this case there is narrative in the synopsis, as can be seen in the past tense verbs occurred, bumped into, were holding, and ripped. The narrative here is in the third person, describing what happened from a neutral perspective. In the section of the text which is entitled “narrative” there is a switch to the first person. This is because it is essential to know specifically which person is saying exactly what.

Once again the narrative uses active verbs showing what a person was doing: I was driving, I was waived down, I radioed. The same procedure is followed in the narratives provided in the third person regarding the victims and the witness. Description is different from narrative because it emphasizes the state of things, and it very often makes use of adjectives. The main purpose of description is to bring a scene to life so that the reader can use his or her senses to more fully imagine the situation, the surroundings and the people.

Examples of this can be seen in phrases such as A male suspect. The bags which were grabbed are also important as evidence and the various parties involved in the incident call them workout bags, which emphasizes their connection with the gym, and the purpose that the women said they were using them for. In the description of the bags as evidence, however, the phrase the two Nike workout bags is used. The qualifying words two, Nike and workout are chosen to give as much accurate information as possible.

The descriptions of the injuries are given extremely detailed size descriptions: a bruise about 1-inch in length, a 2 inch cut and a 1-inch scrape. This is quite a cold and clinical description which does not sensationalize the injuries, nor trivialize them, but just simply states their nature and extent. There is an example of technical description in the phrase his Miranda Rights which describes in legal terms the official warning that police officers have to give suspects in order to protect their individual rights.

The capital letters indicate that this is an official rule, referring back to the codes of conduct that the police have to obey. When description is used for an action then adverbs are often the favored method of doing this. The verb