Zuniga 1

Mariela Zuniga
Professor Lasley
Rhetorical Analysis
7 October 2018
An Unrecognized Method of Analyzation
“I can't remember whether Sue was late for her own wedding, and if I asked her now
she'd surely say she was on time, but if my mother's got it right, Sue will be late for her own
funeral.” (Robillard 75) Beginning her essay off with a narrative on the importance and
implications of time in her family, Amy Robillard in her essay, “It's Time for Class: Toward a
More Complex Pedagogy of Narrative,” goes on to describe the significance of a personal
narrative in formal writing. Primarily, she focuses on the classist implications of narratives as
well as the understanding of time within a formal piece of writing, claiming that narratives allow
students to develop class consciousness; thus narratives facilitate the understanding of the
historical relationships people of the same class share with one another. How she does this is by
utilizing background knowledge, exhibits and examples of her own experience, arguments of
other authors she builds upon, and method- a lense she uses to carry out her analysis. This is
otherwise known as BEAM, an acronym coined by the author Joseph Bizup, who holds that it is
the best way to analyze rhetorical strategies in a research paper. By using the BEAM acronym, I
am able to discover Robillard’s personal role when it comes to the topic of narratives in formal
compositional settings and how she uses her own experiences to develop her argument.
Robillard illustrates her argument by including her own relatable narrative in the
beginning of her essay in order to discuss the role of time in her family and first handedly
express the ability of working-class students, much like herself, to take control in their writing.
By mentioning the fact that she originates from a lower class background, she is setting up the
framework for her argument that personal experiences are essential to the compositional
development of a working class individual (Robillard 82). The intimate exhibit she uses to
describe her mother’s infamous punctuality, and her sister’s determent towards it encourages
other writers to indulge in their past, make meaning of it, and apply that same analyzation to
their present and future endeavors. Hence, in order to understand class consciousness, readers
and writers both must be able to recognize that affiliations of the past, through personal
anecdotes, really do matter. Robillard argues that discussing class-based issues, a topic which is
often dismissed in a classroom setting, almost always requires storytelling; the idea is that
individuals must build off of their past in order to grow and develop their writing style.
On top of using exhibitional narratives in order to develop her argument, Robillard also
approaches the topic of the class-based affiliations of narratives in a distinct way, known as her
method. In her second paragraph, she mentions a few noteworthy authors who have also raised
awareness to the importance of narratives in a compositional setting. These include of Linda
Brodke, Lynn Z. Bloom, and Julie Lindquist; however, she establishes her distinct method by
breaking away from their argument and focusing on a student’s experience using personal
anecdotes in a formal piece of writing. She states, “But we don't always grant this same trust to
 Zuniga 2

our students when they tell us their personal stories in writing we assign,” which is the focal
point of her essay (Robillard 75). Throughout the piece, Robillard encourages professors and
teachers to adopt the analytical strategy of narratives because as you write a story, you are
automatically analyzing it due to the words, phrases, and style you choose to implement.
Through her use of argument, Robillard continues to hold the idea that students are able
to analyze texts through narratives. By quoting the argument by Irvin Peckham stating, “as
writing teachers ‘we have been trained to marginalize the kinds of narrative and descriptive
writing tasks that resonate with the working-class experience and to valorize the abstract,
analytical writing tasks at which the professional/managerial-class students excel,’” Robillard
encourages professional educators to take into account the demographics of their classroom
before eliminating the significance an analytical strategy- the narrative (Robillard 79). Most
commonly, there is a misconception amongst educators that narratives are not challenging
students, as Peckham implies, which is why they are deemed as an ineffective way to analyze
text and thereby unadopted. Robillard extends Peckham’s argument by emphasizing the positive
influence that narratives can have on making students feel much more comfortable sharing and
writing their ideas.
Conclusively, the final strategy Robillard uses in her essay to develop her argument is
background, otherwise known as common knowledge used to give authority to an idea or a set of
ideas. In her essay, Robillard argues that not only the use of narratives have class affiliations, but
also the conceptions of time. She continuously mentions the idea of “delayed gratification,”
where professors tend to request their students to focus on their future rather than their past,
while completely disregarding the fact that working-class students need to build off of their past
in order to get to where they want to be (Robillard 75). Delayed gratification is a concept that she
regards as common knowledge because of how often it is emphasized in higher education despite
its primary effect being the alienation of working-class students.
Robillard, correlating to the authors she mentioned in the beginning of her essay, follows
their lead by speaking out against middle-class assumptions of higher compositional writing
courses, where class distinctions are often ignored. However, she branches out from the other
authors when she zeroes in on the certain issues that working-class students specifically face
upon using narratives in their formal writing assignments. Ultimately, Robillard pushes for a new
pedagogy of narratives because she has noticed a pattern of them being constantly unrecognized
and deemed insignificant, a pattern which further isolates students who may not have had the
privilege of learning the traditional forms of analyzation. Her purpose is essentially to give
underprivileged students an equal opportunity to realize their full potential without their writing
style and structure being reprehended, which she accomplishes through by utilizing BEAM.