Prewriting

Prewriting for Rhetorical Case Study

What connects my sources?

All of my sources focus on how TCU did in its recruiting efforts this off-season. Compared to years past, TCU has had great success, and a trend in my sources is how different recruiting is for TCU now, compared to say five years ago. TCU is now legitimately competing with the powerhouses like Texas and Oklahoma for top tier recruits. In years past, TCU had to take a back seat to schools like these, and they would have to pick over what was left behind. Now, they are getting some of the best this country has to offer, and kids are seeking TCU out more as well. All of this is mixed in all four of my sources. Some go more in depth than others, but the general ideas are definitely covered.

Summarize into two sentences or so:

TCU is becoming a major player in the recruiting process because of its consistent success in recent years. This success is allowing for TCU to compete with powerhouse schools, and actually swoop in and take recruits who might have considered bigger schools. Also, kids are starting to consider TCU themselves.

Organization Technique:

I am going to start with the smallest (local) medium, and then I will work my way up to the biggest (national) medium. Seeing how TCU’s recruiting was covered in the Daily Skiff, to the Telegram, and on to ESPN. Taking in and dissecting each one, and giving my analysis of each. Then, after all four have been covered, I would kind of take a compare and contrast approach, analyzing why coverage was the way it was, etc.

I think this approach would be effective because it covers all the bases, and it is in a consistent, almost chronological approach, from most coverage, to least, or smallest medium to biggest. It allows for separation of the sources and it still leaves an opening to come back in and tie it all back up together.

How am I going to transition from source to source?

I think the flow is going to be fairly simple because I am going to take it source by source, starting with the skiff, explain why the coverage was so big and elaborate, and then going into the Telegram article. With that, I would relate it back a bit to the Skiff article, because there is heavy coverage in both, but I would showcase the differences in the two, because a college newspaper is going to be a little bit more favorable and generic in some cases than a city newspaper, in a huge market. From there I would go into the first ESPN article, which is actually a blog. I would transition with how the coverage changes a bit, but is still quite similar, and from there to the fourth source, I would make a point to show how little coverage there is, especially compared to the first source. Mostly though, I would make it a simple transition from source to source and I would do the majority of the comparing and contrasting when I am done revealing each source. That way I could jump from local to national, and so on. It would much more confusing to do that if all sources had not been established and presented. I feel like this would create good flow that would make the paper an easy, somewhat interesting read for the reader.