Rhetorical Analyses
Our analyses of Laura's tutoring were initially aimed at examining key aspects of the ethos she presents to her clients and looking at the logos of her messages to determine why she seemed to be such a successful tutor.
The more of Laura's work we analyzed (proceeding in chronological order), the more we realized that something was amiss. The six samples of her tutoring we present here with analyses appended illustrate our experience of discovering just what was going on.
The focus and tone of the analyses shift from one which first muses about what appear to be some glitches in Laura's technique (which could cause potential ethos problems) to one which counts and measures the kinds of comments she makes. The result is disappointment in the ratio of surface correction to substantive dialogue with the client writers.
Rather than break up the analyses into separate pages, we left them in one long file in order to better illustrate the process of our developing awareness of the problem of Laura's double agency.
We are certain that there were multiple causes for this event, but, in response to these tutoring logs, one of our reviewers commented that the medium itself so thoroughly encapsulates the dialogue within a text that it "almost forces us into a Current-Traditional Read and Response of the text."
