Deer Park Rhetorical Analysis Rubric
1. Find a paragraph of 5-6 lines of to analyze (at least four sentences). Write or type these exact lines in
your journal.
2. Identify the POV structure in this specific moment of text. Specifically describe how it affirms or
breaks with the previous POV pattern (if it’s your first example, you will talk about how it establishes this
pattern). Go beyond first, second or third person. What persona does the narrator use? What tone is tied to
this persona? Who is the audience?
3. Identify the syntax pattern. Divide this into three sections:
a) Does the author use compound, compound complex, passive, active, simple, cumulative or periodic
sentences? Which type of sentences dominate? COUNT! Talk about patterns.
b) Check out punctuation–periods, commas, dashes, hyphens, parentheses, ellipses, semicolons,
colons. Which type of punctuation dominates? Do not just say he or she uses periods. There is more to it.
Can you find any patterns?
c) Look at the rhetorical terms on 76- 79 of the resource book. Does the author use any of these? If he
or she doesn’t, say so and think about what this means for this section.
4. Look at repeated words in the work as a whole. Pay careful attention to how the author develops
primary and subsidiary patterns and how this particular section deviates from or emphasizes this pattern
(this is diction if you’re wondering). Use pages 85 and 86 of your resource book for assistance.
5. Think of the section’s basic chronology. Why is this section in this particular place? What patterns of
organization are used or suggested? This is different than plot. You need to focus on how the writer
moves the text along through comparison and contrast and other strategies described on page 30 of your
resource book.
6. Write 2-3 sentences explaining what this paragraph has to do with the overall plot or argument of the
essay. Keep it simple. “The character is about to save a kitten and find out he’s a decent person even
though he doesn’t want to be a decent person.”
7. Think about what you read this week in this book. Then think about modernism, historical context and
the quote’s context within what you’ve read of the book so far. How does the selected quote speak to
larger social, historical or philosophical issues in the book and when the book was written? This should
be at least two sentences.
8. Choose one of the above. Write six to ten sentences analyzing the strategies used by the author to make
his or her argument or develop a theme. You are required to embed quotes. You can combine two–like,
for example, a connection between word choice and sentence patterns–but you need to fully interrogate at
least one strategy. DO NOT give me a superficial summary of what you already have. Make sure you
have at least two examples or two effects and you clearly identify the author’s purpose.
HINT: If the author does not use an identified rhetorical strategy, this is itself a rhetorical strategy. Talk
about how the author inverts or subverts traditional patterns.
1 Example Analysis In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
1. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plain of western Kansas, a lonesome area that
other Kansans call “out there.” Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside,
with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than
Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the
men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed
toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white
cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler
reaches them” (1).
2. Capote uses third-person omniscient but the reader gets the sense that the narrator is trying to
figure out the town described as he describes the landscape (which would make it different than a
strict third-person omniscient). The persona seems to be someone unfamiliar with the landscape,
a tourist or traveler of some sort, distantly descriptive rather than fully immersed or all-knowing.
His tone moves from laconic and ironic, “out there” and “ranch-hand nasalness,” to elevated and
impassioned, “awesomely extensive” and “Greek temples.” I would guess he is talking to people
not from Kansas, maybe people from a city like New York.
3. a) Capote moves from simple to complex and then to compound. He ends the paragraph with
another compound sentence this time with a list or series attached. He moves from active to
passive sentences, with the second half of the paragraph almost all passive and using linking
verbs. b) Every sentence has a comma that provides appositives, extra description or lists. The
paragraph builds up to a semicolon list. There is one quotation for ironic effect. He uses three
hyphenated adjectives. c) There is a cumulative sentence but no periodic sentences. He uses
anaphora with “the” except for the sentence that begins with “some” (though even this sentence
contains the same “the” clause).
4. Several words that seem to connote loneliness begin the paragraph: “lonesome,” “out there,”
“Kansans,” “countryside,” desert-clear.” Sharp words follow: “twang,” “barbed,” “high-heeled,”
“hard,” “pointed,” “nasalness.” Then vaguely religious words: “awesomely,” “gracefully,”
“Greek.” A bunch of proper nouns denoting specific places: “Holcomb,” Kansas,” “Colorado,”
Far West,” “Middle West,” “Greek.” Made up word or neologism: “nasalness.” He seems to
make a movement from euphonious to cacophonous and then back to euphonious.
5. This is the opening of the book, so it sets the stage for the action to follow. It operates as an
introduction. I would say this is a “spatial order organization” within the paragraph (maybe an
ironic one, making fun of travelogues).
6. He is very concerned with establishing where the setting is geographically and how it is different
from not only New York but the rest of Kansas. If cities are sometimes fake America, this is the
true American heartland. As this is a murder mystery, is there a connection to detective stories
that take place in cities?
7. Capote establishes the prosaic or dull surroundings for the murder and yet also suggests that truly
tragic elements exist hidden in the landscape itself (grain elevators like Greek temples). This
possibly speaks to the tragic underpinning of the American Dream, a dream crucial to 1950s
American identity. In this first section as a whole, “The Last to See Them Alive,” Capote shows
so many different dreamers (Clutters/Killers); it’s interesting to think what he might be saying
about the violence hidden just beneath those hard lonely blue skies.
8. Capote’s syntactical movement mirrors the narrator’s paradoxically ironic and earnest fascination
with Holcomb. After establishing narrative distance through boring verbs and relatively simple
sentences– “the village of Holcomb stands”– each sentence begins with a similar structural
clause: “the land is flat,” “the views are awesomely extensive,” and “the local accent is barbed.”
The passive voice, linking verbs and monotonous anaphora further exaggerates Hocolmb’s quaint
and comic exoticism. Not only do the tedious verbs and passive sentences distance the narrator
2 from the world he describes, but the commas and ironic embedded quotations (“out there”) also
add to this reserved and perhaps mocking tone. Yet just as the initial syntax removes the reader
from the landscape, Capote’s final sentence, with the help of a lone semicolon, dramatically
transitions to a list that builds from abrupt semantic units to a sweeping and literary finale with
“grain elevators rising gracefully,” and the reader understands that even a boring country town
like Holcomb can have its own sort of tragic beauty.
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