Mastering SPACE CAT for AP Language Rhetorical Analysis Essays

hey guys welcome back to coach all rights in today's video we're going to be looking at space cat it's basically a

new acronym that has sort of taken the place of soapstone ever since the College Board redesigned the AP Language

exam in 2019 so in this video we're going to look at what the different components are that way we can decide

how best to use this in a rhetorical analysis essay the essence face cat stands first speaker so it's important

to note that when you have a speech it's a speaker if it's a letter it's the writer and if you have a novel excerpt

it's the author but all of those serve the same purpose basically you need to figure out who wrote or said what's in

the passage and then what credentials they have now for the AP Language exam specifically for the rhetorical analysis

question they will give you the necessary info in the prompt itself so they're very good about giving you the

necessary biographical information including birth and death dates or whatever you might need in order for the

passage to make sense now when you're looking at the multiple-choice section it's also important to read the

italicized words about the passage because that will tell you where it came from and that could clue you in on who

the speaker actually is for that as well the P stands for purpose and I think it's really important to understand that

there are a lot of layers to purpose and so we don't want to just stop with to inform or to entertain or to instruct

because there's usually a deeper meaning so first of all to inform whom about what so the whom and the what come up

later in space cat but it's important to realize that these things work together so as far as purpose what we really need

to understand is why did the speaker or writer say or write what they did what was their overall goal what were they

trying to achieve by doing this what is the lasting effect of it what is the desired effect on the audience things

like that so purpose can be multi-dimensional and technically speaking a passage can actually have

multiple purposes in fact we're going to talk about strategies later on in this video but the strategies themselves can

have different purposes but the passage as a whole should have a purpose as well the first a and space cat stands for

audience and this is actually a component that I find very important but one that I think students

tend to identify but then overlooked is they're actually writing their essays and so you need to remember that a

speaker tailors his or her message to his or her audience and so they choose their words and their strategies very

carefully because they have a certain goal a certain purpose and so when we look at a prompt let's say it's a speech

or a letter on the exam the College Board does provide you with a clue as to who the audience is

sometimes it's more than a clue sometimes they outright say it more often than not it's listed right there

like Gandhi's letter to Lord Irwin that's his audience or Madeleine Albright's commencement speech to the

graduates of Mount Holyoke College and all-women's College so in those we need to understand the relationship so for

instance Gandhi is from India which was under British control so we have that relationship between Gandhi and Lord

Irwin there and when you read the passage and you realize what he's asking for

/ demanding you realize the relationship between the two and then you could think about Madeleine Albright female speaker

she's a politician speaking to an all-girls college right as they're graduating and about to go off into the

real world and so her message in that speech is tailored to her audience so those choices matter because of who the

audience is even in the Abigail Adams letter to her son it's an audience of one she's only writing to one person her

son but there's a mother-son relationship there so it's really important to realize not only who the

audience is but how that person might impact the speaker's message now sometimes the audience isn't outright

stated in the prompt itself for instance I'm thinking of the loof passage in which it was an excerpt from his novel

if you look at the passage you realize that there is a section where he's using the word we and presumably we as the

people of his generation and so that could be part of his audience and based on the anecdote earlier in the passage

you could argue that perhaps he's also speaking to parents and so sometimes the audience isn't necessarily told to you

but based on how the passage is excerpted you can think about who the audience actually is and you

want to try if possible to be a bit more specific with the term audience you don't want to just say like society or

people in general if you can be more specific than that but audience is very important because the speaker makes

choices in order to persuade the audience with the acronym soapstone one of the esses stood for subject now we

don't have subject in space cat but we do have context so subject is what the person is speaking about context is a

little bit more broad and therefore in some sense a bit more helpful so you've heard of the term historical context so

think about the time period in which this passage is from so what was going on at the time for instance like Abigail

Adams we know that she was a first lady but she wasn't necessarily the first lady when she wrote this letter but in

the letter itself it references the American Revolution so were able to kind of realize the historical context of a

lot of these passages just by what the passage says the Gandhi letter for instance if you didn't necessarily know

exactly when India was under British control you would figure that out from the letter as well so context is

something that you need to consider because oftentimes these documents are in some way a response to what is

happening either locally or nationally or personally at the time that it's being written so context helps you

understand some of the bigger social implications of the piece next up is exigence so this is kind of like

occasion if you're familiar with soapstone they're not exactly the same thing but to be honest I think they're

kind of similar or at least I think students interpret them rather similarly so if you've never heard of exigence

this is a term to remember especially if you're currently in AP lang because some of the questions on AP classroom

actually ask what the exigence of the piece is and it's a multiple-choice thing so exigence is basically the

catalyst it's what prompts or compels the speaker to speak or the writer to write and so I

say there's a little bit of overlap with occasion because for instance if it's a commencement speech presumably it was

the graduation ceremony that compelled them to but you also want to take into

consideration the audience in the context and how they're tailoring their message to those things so exigence is

just kind of like the thing the event that whatever that gets it all started so that's important because you want to

know why they're writing or speaking in the first place the second C stands for choices and so

if you've heard of rhetorical strategies that's basically what we're talking about here except I guess technically

speaking rhetorical choices is even broader of a term so a rhetorical strategy is a rhetorical choice but not

every single rhetorical choice is a strategy so for instance when people use humor or flattery that might be a choice

that they're making you could think of it as a strategy as well but I think the word choices opens up more possibilities

for students to analyze so I've listed some common strategies slash choices here these are ones that I think tend to

come up more frequently than others so it's things like juxtaposition and anecdote notice that I'm not listing

things like a sin data nor synecdoche or any of those that sound really fancy because when you name drop those in an

essay it doesn't actually make you sound any smarter and sometimes just because you know it's there doesn't mean you can

analyze it well so I tend to encourage students to just kind of like stick to the ones that they can analyze well and

even though they might seem simpler it's perfectly okay and another thing is you want to make sure that you're not

necessarily just only using the strategy name like for instance you can use juxtaposition as a verb like he

juxtaposes x & y so you want to be really specific if you're talking about an anecdote tell what the anecdote is

about if you're talking about imagery you might want to work in maybe like diction or tone as well so a lot of

strategies and choices go together and so it's not necessarily that you're writing about one choice per paragraph

sometimes it's more than one choice working together to create this message the second a stands for appeals now

you've probably heard of logos ethos and pathos but there are other types of Appeals my caution would be appeals is

that while there's probably at least one appeal in everything which you read you want to make sure

that you're actually examining like why something is logical or why something is credible like why does the speaker need

to use logic here and so oftentimes students can identify when something is logical or credible or when it's an

appeal to emotion they don't develop the analysis enough so for instance if you're gonna say pathos it would sound

much better to just say the author appeals to emotion and then my correction then would be which emotion

so instead of saying the author uses pathos it would sound much better to say the author appeals to nostalgia okay and

then you're starting to get into the audience connection they're like why does the author use this appeal so

appeals can be very helpful but you want to make sure that you're actually examining the implications of that

appeal lastly we have tone now tone is something that is created by word choice so every passage that you read is going

to have a tone now for my own students I encourage them not to write an entire paragraph about tone because tone is

often dictated by the other choices that the author is making so tone can be brought up a lot more subtly than I

think some students initially realize so for instance when describing the speech you could say the riveting yet

frightening speech or something like that so you want to use like two different words there that's one way to

incorporate it so notice that I didn't say the author uses a riveting tone or anything like that and then you can also

use it like for instance if you're talking about satire if you say the author sarcastically references or

something like that it's implied that sarcastic is the tone in that case so you can actually talk about tone without

using the word tone and I think that leads for more sophistication and your writing not that you're going to

automatically are in the sophistication point but it makes your writing sound a little bit more advanced and so tone can

be worked in in different ways so you want to look for a tone shift do you want to look for the relationship

between a particular strategy and the tone is creating but oftentimes tone not something that we examine in

isolation especially for trying to write a paragraph about it usually you can work tone into the other paragraphs that

you've written and looking at the acronym of space cat as a whole it's clear that there are multiple components

that one needs to consider when doing a rhetorical analysis so it's not that any of these things are new in 2019 but

rather this is a new way to present it to students in hopes that it will help broaden your understanding of the text

and lead to deeper analysis