Rhetoric is the art of persuasion and provides the foundation for all argument based pieces. In a rhetorical analysis, you will look for the strategies and devices utilized by an author to argue for a certain purpose. In the next few blog posts, we will analyze new tips and tricks to ensure that you find great success in writing a Rhetorical Analysis Essay.
In the Rhetorical Analysis Essay, you are given a prompt and an excerpt that you will analyze for rhetorical appeals. We will discuss three-four steps that involve the preparation procedure before you start writing your rhetorical analysis. Utilize these instructions to make annotations on the day of the test. Remember, this is only the pre-write for your essay and you should not spend too much time on this. However, it is still an important step to crafting a well-written essay.
Step 1(Take a Quick Read):
This step is optional and the more you practice Rhetorical Analysis, the fewer times you have to read a passage. If this is your first time or you don't feel comfortable with Rhetorical Analysis, don't worry, we'll get you prepared.
The image below is a complete Rhetorical Analysis prompt from the 2019 AP Lang exam. Read through the prompt and the passage to get a first impression of Rhetorical Analysis.
Did you read it? Are you intimidated by it? Don't worry, it's not as bad as it seems.
In this blog post, I will teach you how to analyze a document when you first receive it. On test day, you will have approximately five minutes to do this.
Step 2(Getting a feel):
Get familiar with the context, speaker, audience, and general subject of the passage. Most of this comes from the large introduction paragraph at the top of the page.
In our example, the context is during the British colonization of India, the speaker is Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, the audience is the Viceroy Lord Irwin, and the subject is about British oppression in India.
The things you find here can be utilized in an intro paragraph. However, I suggest that the intro paragraph should also include original words that have your own take on the subject presented.
For example, you can begin with "In the context of world history, peaceful activism has generally never been successful as that of Mohandas Gandhi who inspired movements of nonviolence that inspired and eventually led to the ultimate independence of India." Here, I was able to quickly paraphrase a new contextualization with my own twist. Although the intro paragraph isn't necessary as it is not included in the scoring, a good intro is definitive of good writing.
This step should take less than two minutes, and you can already start writing your intro paragraph at this point.
Step 3(Getting a Purpose):
Now that we have established basic contextualization, we must analyze for the purpose of the article. The purpose is the most important thing in your paper. It will form the backbone of the entire essay and all evidence will have to support and point to this purpose. Here are a few ways to spot the purpose.
- Find the issues proposed or problem encountered by the author
ex. the British colonial monopoly
- Find the author's proposal to solve this issue, it will appear throughout but is usually most prevalent near the end.
ex. Gandhi proposes England and India should build a closer relation
Step 4(Getting Evidence):
When you analyze an article, it is easy to see simple devices. Devices are a surface-level feature of an article; use these with caution as these are the ones that most people will use. That means it is only average. A clever way to get away with using devices is to group all the devices into a central genre, such as grouping parallelism and anaphora under repetition.
If you want to obtain a higher score, simply utilizing devices is not enough. You will need to analyze common strategies and structures implemented throughout the excerpt. This will also include using appeals to logos, pathos, and ethos.
- ex. Gandhi implements a structure to placate hostilities between him and the Viceroy. Firstly, he appeals to the emotional appeal of the viceroy as Gandhi says that he will not "harm [the Viceroy's] people". Gandhi utilizes the Viceroy's attachment to the familiarity of other people in order to coax him to be less hostile.
In the example given, it only analyzes a certain piece of text evidence. This still requires further reasoning to link it to the purpose. I will teach you how to do this in the next blog post where we will discover how to write a truly sublime body paragraph.
I liked this article a lot! It made me cry a little