The Rhetorical Analysis Essay
- Analyze the rhetorical choices a writer makes to achieve a purpose
- Write commentary that links a choice to its effect on the audience
- Avoid mere identification of devices without analysis of their function
Analyze choices, not devices
The rhetorical analysis essay gives you a nonfiction passage and asks how the writer uses rhetorical choices to achieve a purpose. The essential shift is from what devices appear to why the writer chose them and what effect they create. Naming "the author uses a metaphor" is identification, not analysis. The analytical move is: the author’s metaphor of the nation as a "ship in a storm" makes the crisis feel shared and survivable, uniting a frightened audience behind the captain. Function and effect, tied to purpose and audience — that is the whole task.
The appeals: ethos, pathos, logos
Writers persuade through three classic appeals. Ethos builds the speaker’s credibility and character ("As a doctor of thirty years…"). Pathos stirs the audience’s emotions (a vivid image of a suffering child). Logos appeals to logic and evidence (statistics, cause-and-effect reasoning). These are lenses for analysis, not a checklist to name. The point is to show how a specific choice enacts an appeal for a purpose: a speaker cites her credentials (ethos) precisely because a skeptical audience needs a reason to trust her before they will accept her data.
Commentary is the essay
In rhetorical analysis, the commentary — your explanation of how each choice works — is the essay; the quoted evidence is only its raw material. A reliable structure for each point is choice → effect → purpose: name the rhetorical choice, explain the effect it has on the audience, and connect that effect to the writer’s overall purpose. Skip the effect and you are just listing; skip the purpose and your analysis floats free. The best essays sustain this chain across the whole passage, showing choices working together toward one end.
Analyze the rhetorical choice in this original excerpt from a wartime address: "I will not promise you an easy road. I promise you only this: that I will walk every mile of it beside you."
- 1.Identify the choice: antithesis and parallelism — "I will not promise… I promise you only" — set a refused promise against a real one.
- 2.Note the ethos appeal: pledging to "walk every mile beside you" presents the speaker as a fellow sufferer, building trust and character.
- 3.Explain the effect on the audience: refusing false comfort makes the speaker seem honest, and the promise of shared hardship makes a frightened audience feel accompanied rather than abandoned.
- 4.Connect to purpose: these choices aim to steel the audience for a hard struggle while binding them to the leader — resolve plus solidarity.
Which of the following is genuine rhetorical analysis rather than mere identification?
Do not write a "device hunt" — a tour of every figure of speech with no explanation. AP readers explicitly penalize essays that identify devices without analyzing their function. One choice fully analyzed beats five choices merely named.
A speaker opens by detailing her twenty years of frontline medical experience before presenting her data on a treatment. This choice primarily appeals to:
For every body paragraph, run the chain choice → effect → purpose: what did the writer do, what does it do to the audience, and how does it serve the purpose you named in your thesis? Sustaining that chain across the passage is how the rhetorical analysis essay reaches the top of the reasoning row.
Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.
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