So far you have built arguments. Rhetorical analysis turns around and studies someone else’s. You already have the tools: the rhetorical situation, the appeals, kairos, and the kinds of claims. Now you use them to explain how a text works.
Key idea
Rhetorical analysis explains how a writer’s choices serve a purpose for an audience. It doesn’t retell what the text says (summary), and it doesn’t argue whether the writer is right (argument).
Why it works
Analysis teaches you to see the machinery behind persuasion: why this word, this order, this story, for these readers. Once you can see it in Lincoln or Douglass, you can see it in an advertisement, a school letter, or your own draft, and use it on purpose.
| Kind of sentence | About the Gettysburg Address |
|---|---|
| Summary: what it says | Lincoln says the soldiers gave their lives so that the nation might live. |
| Analysis: how it works on its audience | By repeating “we can not” three times, Lincoln admits that words fall short of the soldiers’ deeds, which shifts the duty of honoring them from the speakers to the living listeners. |
| Argument about the topic | Lincoln was right that the war was worth fighting. |
Questions to start with
- Situation: who wrote it, for whom, when, and in answer to what?
- Purpose: what did the writer want the audience to think, feel or do?
- Choices: what did the writer do with words, order, examples, appeals and tone?
- Effects: how would each choice work on that audience, and how does it serve the purpose?
Many classrooms use the acronym SOAPSTone (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, Tone) for the first step. It is a handy checklist; the analysis begins when you connect those answers to the writer’s choices.
Worked example: Summary to analysis
Summary: “Douglass says he is nervous to speak.” Turn it into analysis.
- Situation: a friendly, anti-slavery audience gathered for a Fourth of July event.
- Choice: he opens by confessing nervousness: “He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have.”
- Effect: the modesty wins goodwill and reminds listeners how far he has come.
- Purpose: it prepares them to accept the harsh truths later in the speech from a speaker they already trust.
Answer: “Douglass opens with modesty, confessing his nerves, to win his audience’s goodwill before he turns their holiday into an indictment.”
Common mistake
Summarizing the text, or arguing with it, instead of explaining how it works on its audience. Check each sentence of your draft: does it name a choice and say what that choice does for the writer’s purpose? Summary is fine in small doses to set up a quotation; argument about the topic belongs in a different essay.