What Is A Rhetorical Analysis Essay
Remember I mentioned the movie Inception? Well, the concept of “a dream within a dream” is
mimicked here, just with a slight alteration. Essentially, a rhetorical analysis is a type of essay
that requires you to “write about the writing”. If you have a question mark looming over your
head, do not worry as this will all make sense with a little bit of reading. In this type of analysis,
you are breaking apart the words and phrases that the author creates, in order to uncover the
strategies and persuasive styles that they are using to get some reaction from a crowd. Most of
the time, the
example topics
are speeches given by influential figures. In other words, when
given an essay prompt on the exam, the instructor is asking you to analyze the text and explain
how all the “written parts” work together.
Preparation Strategy
Since the AP exam is a time-limited task, swift and effective preparation is key to creating a
powerful
piece of academic writing
! Considering the fact that your allotted time has to be broken
down into reading, analyzing and writing, multi-tasking with reading and analyzing is a must. As
you begin reading the introductory information, start taking notes of important information that
will simplify the analysis process.
Who is the author?
What is their intended target audience?
What is their purpose for writing this speech/document?
In what setting are they located while giving the speech? Why specifically this setting?
Having these questions in mind and uncovering their answers will simplify the process of
analyzing their strategies. At the very least it gives you something to work off, and having this
information allows you to understand their methods of persuasion and how it affects the ethos,
pathos, and logos.
The ingredients for persuasion, as Aristotle called them, can be broken down into three
categories. There are the ethos, pathos, and logos. The
ethos appeals to ethics
, and this is all
about providing traits and reasons as to why the speaker is a credible source of information. The
pathos appeals to emotions
and is a sneaky way of convincing an audience by creating an
emotional response. Last but not least, we have the
logos
(my personal favorite) which
appeals
to logical and rational thinking
and tries to persuade the audience through reasoning.
Ethos: “Doctors all over the world recommend this type of treatment!”
Pathos: “You’ll make the right decision because you have something that not many
people do: you have the heart."
Logos: “Thousand of years of history has taught us that war never changes”
In every AP English exam, the literary prompt will contain examples of at least one of the three
persuasive methods. After using the background info to help guide you, it should not be too
difficult to figure out which tactic the speaker uses. Obviously, one should practice writing
rhetorical analysis essays before taking the exam!
