How to Write a Rhetorical Analysis for High School
A rhetorical analysis serves to dissect the various approaches, styles and uses of voice of a particular piece of writing. The goal is to uncover the reasoning and argumentation the author uses in the text and to assess how successful the use of rhetoric is. Rather than simply writing about your personal reaction to the written work, a rhetorical analysis demands that you assess how the author argues his point to his intended reading audience. This type of analysis is a fantastic way to improve on your own writing skills at the high school level and to consider the various ways authors have approached the craft of writing.
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Instructions
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Write an introductory paragraph, which introduces the text to be analyzed and gives some factual background on the author and the piece. Summarize what the author argues in the written work. At the end of the introductory paragraph, you should write your own thesis statement, which sums up your view of the rhetorical analysis and how successful the piece is at making the argument. An example of a thesis statement would be: "Winston Churchill's speeches appealed to the emotional state of the British public during the war to effectively state his case." The word "effectively" suggests that the author successfully argues his case.
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Use the body of the rhetorical analysis to pin point specific instances of the author's rhetorical strategy. Focus on a single aspect of the written work for each paragraph you write. Commonly, a rhetorical analysis will break down the author's approach to his argument from the beginning of the written work to the end. Start with the first point he argues, explain how he argues it, the affect the example makes on the reader, the tone of the aspect under investigation, and how successful the specific point is in making the author's overall case. For example, if an author uses a personal anecdote near the beginning of his written work to illustrate his argument, discuss how the author utilizes the personal anecdote to appeal to an audience and capture the audience's attention about the topic early on in the work. Finish the paragraph with your overall assessment of the specific element under discussion and express whether it successfully accomplished the author's goal.
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Write a succinct paragraph, which sums up the overall effectiveness of the piece of work under analysis. In this section, feel free to include critiques or praise for the author's approach. A powerful technique in creating your own convincing argument is to suggest what the harshest critic would say about the author's approach and rebut this viewpoint with specific examples from the written piece.
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Conclude the rhetorical analysis by summarizing your main thesis and recapping the major points you made within the paper. Broaden the topic and place your analysis, as well as the author's written work, in the context of the wider field. For example, if you are dissecting a Victorian novel, suggest how this novel fits into the larger body of literature during the same era, or how the novel fits into the historical moment of its creation. Open up the discussion for future works by suggesting new avenues for investigation. For instance, "While Dostoevsky convincingly places his reader within the mindset of a murderer in "Crime and Punishment," more valuable work could be done on how his work compares with Ivan Turgenev's work in the same era."
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Tips & Warnings
Edit your work by reading the essay out loud a few times to yourself.
Have a peer read over the final draft to look for clarity and grammatical mistakes.
Always cite the works you utilized in the rhetorical analysis.
Practice writing a rhetorical analysis on a short newspaper article before attempting an analysis on a longer work.
References
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