The genre of analysis encompasses several different aspects of examination. Completing an analysis begins the moment you carefully read or review a form of text or other content that shares a message. In developing an analysis, you may be asked to locate different components of the text or visual and consider the impact or effect of the content. As a student, you may be asked to complete a literary, textual, or rhetorical analysis. Each of these types of analysis will require you to investigate and evaluate ideas thoroughly. A literary analysis might ask you to review a text and argue your interpretation of the text. A textual analysis requires the same close attention to detail but will focus more specifically on the meaning of a text. A rhetorical analysis often focuses on non-fiction examples like articles, speeches, and commercials. Literary and textual analysis focus on the text as a whole, while rhetorical analysis focuses on how the author uses language to persuade the reader.

Rhetorical Analysis

According to Scriptorium’s Composition Handbook, rhetorical analysis is a genre of reading analysis that investigates how rhetorical strategies and devices are used within a text, speech, visual piece, or multimodal textual product. It involves a detailed examination of the choices made by the author or creator to achieve specific rhetorical purposes, such as persuasion, argumentation, or the evocation of emotions. Writers use this genre to deeply understand a communicative product, its author’s intentions, and how those intentions are being crafted within the piece for an audience. Writers also use this genre to determine if the purpose or intent of a piece is being met or not met. Rhetorical analysis is the study of persuasion, whether emotional, authoritative, or logical, and so is done best on a piece that has a specific purpose. Rhetorical analysis is most often conducted on political speeches, pieces of propaganda, historical documents, or any communicative act or product that has a specific audience and purpose.

In the textbook English 102: Journey Into Open, author Christine Jones argues that the best way to learn how to write a good argument is to start by analyzing other arguments. She goes on to explain that a rhetorical analysis begins with the examination of the content and the style of the author. Analysis offers a process for you to see what works, what doesn’t, what strategies another author uses, what structures seem to work well and why, and more. In your English classes, you will learn about analyzing arguments for both content and rhetorical strategies. The content analysis may come a little easier for you, but the rhetorical analysis is extremely important. To become a good writer, we must develop the language of writing and learn how to use that language to talk about the “moves” other writers make.

Rhetorical Analysis Development

You’ve liked heard your instructor explain rhetoric as the art of argument and persuasion, and rhetoricians often study the most effective ways to persuade by analyzing past instances of textual persuasion. Rhetorical analyses are interesting and important documents because they teach you that writing is not a mysterious act. Instead, persuading and convincing and arguing a topic effectively boils down to how successfully you can communicate your topic, using your unique angle, to a specific audience.  

There are many forms of rhetorical analysis that one can engage in, but the primary distinction between these types is the medium of the message. 

Below are just a few different forms of rhetorical analysis: 

1. Text-Based: This sub-genre analyzes textual mediums such as essays, articles, speeches, or literary texts. In this style, you are analyzing how the author uses written language to persuade or influence the audience.

2. Visual: This sub-genre analyzes visual texts that also include design elements, such as advertisements, YouTube videos, social media posts, art pieces or even film scenes. In this style, you are analyzing how visual elements such as design features, color, composition, symbols, and imagery contribute to the rhetorical message and intended impact on the viewer.

3. Speech: This sub-genre analyzes speeches and spoken rhetoric. In this style, you are analyzing how speakers use rhetorical devices such as tone, repetition, pacing, and delivery to convey their message effectively and persuade their audience. This style involves speech that does not include other visual elements, such as a political debate or a podcast,

4. Multimodal: This sub-genre examines how different modes of communication (text, speech, visual) work together. For example, analyzing a social media campaign that includes text, images, and videos to persuade viewers to support a cause, or an advertisement such as a Nike video campaign that has visuals, a voiceover (speech), and text. Much of what is online today is multimodal, and multimodal analysis asks how all of the elements of communication work together to persuade.

5. Comparative: This sub-genre compares two or more rhetorical pieces to analyze how different creators use rhetorical strategies to achieve similar or different rhetorical goals. In a comparative model, you are both analyzing the strategies employed by each creator and then determining which works better and why.

6. Historical: This sub-genre can examine rhetorical texts from historical contexts to understand how rhetoric has been used to influence public opinion, mobilize movements, or shape political discourse over time. This sub-genre can also be the analysis of historical documents that use rhetorical strategies as a way of reading that historical context or speaking to our current moment.  

7. Cultural: This sub-genre explores how rhetorical strategies reflect and shape cultural values, beliefs, and identities within specific communities or societies.

Rhetorical analysis can be performed on just about any piece of created communication, but it works best on pieces that have a clear argument or purpose for a specific audience. In a rhetorical analysis you are determining what is being said, why it is being said, but most importantly how it is being said.

A rhetorical analysis is an examination of the topic, purpose, audience, and context of a piece of text.  A text can be written, spoken, or conveyed in some other manner. The ultimate goal of a rhetorical analysis is twofold:

1. to analyze how well the rhetorical elements work together to create a fitting response, and
2. to evaluate the overall effectiveness of that response.

To examine that goal, there are a couple of approaches that can be made in writing an analysis. The first is to ask some basic questions.

1. How has the place affected the writing?
2. How have the rhetorical elements (rhetorical appeals) affected the writing?
3. Do the means of delivery, genre,  or medium impact the audience?

As you begin, search your answers for an idea that can serve as your claim or thesis. For example, you might focus on the declared goal—if there is one—of the creator of the text and whether it has been achieved.

You might evaluate how successfully that creator has identified the rhetorical audience, shaped a fitting response, or employed the best available means.

Or you might focus on the use of the rhetorical appeals and the overall success of their use.

Whether or not you agree with the text is beside the point. Your job is to analyze how and how well the text’s creator has accomplished the purpose of that text.

1. HOW is the analysis of the parts
2. HOW WELL is the overall evaluation

Developing a Rhetorical Analysis

Rhetorical analysis is a genre of writing that will help you think about strategies other authors have made and how or why these strategies work or don’t work. In turn, your goal is to be more aware of these things in your own writing.

Rhetorical analysis follows a similar formula and involves the strategic and processual dissection of a communicative product into its most important and persuasive elements.

Below is a list of key elements to focus on for your rhetorical analysis:

1. Logos: The piece uses logic or appeals to reason as the central mode of persuasion. The analysis assesses how the logical argument is made and how the piece uses logos to affect the audience.

2. Pathos: The piece uses emotions or an emotional reaction as the central mode of persuasion. The analysis determines how the piece elicits an emotional reaction to persuade or convince or move the audience.

3. Ethos: The piece uses an appeal to the authority or credibility or character of the author to make an argument. The analysis examines how the author establishes their authority and credibility in order to make their argument.

4. Audience and angle: The piece appeals to a specific audience to achieve its purpose. The piece uses a unique perspective, approach or lens to achieve its purpose. The analysis determines how the piece appeals to the audience and for what purpose. The analysis determines how the author integrates their unique angle or approaches an idea creatively to craft their argument.

5. Language: The piece uses specific rhetorical devices to achieve its intended purpose.  

6. Design: The piece relies heavily on visual design, color theory, images, gesture, or art to craft its messaging and achieve its purpose.

CNM instructor Brian Hudson provides an example of the rhetorical triangle and its elements here:

The Rhetorical Triangle

As you begin a rhetorical analysis, you will be asked to rely heavily on specific examples and textual evidence from the piece being analyzed to support interpretations and arguments. Make sure you also include a critical evaluation of how effectively the rhetorical strategies achieve their intended impact on the audience.

Overall, rhetorical analysis as a genre aims to deepen our understanding of how communication works rhetorically and to enhance our own communication skills by dissecting the techniques and effects of persuasive language and discourse. Moreover, sometimes texts are multi-pronged. There is the immediate, surface-level messaging, and then there is the deeper meaning. Rhetorical analysis investigates every level of communication in order to more deeply understand the great persuaders of our time, and those who may fall flat of their intended purpose.

Remember–the best rhetorical analysis arranges rhetorical analysis components to serve a bigger argument about what a piece is trying to accomplish. When you begin your rhetorical analysis, you want to determine what audience the piece is speaking to and for what purpose, and then your rhetorical analysis will be the procedural breakdown of the rhetorical elements that lend themselves to fulfilling that purpose. Finally, you must bring in evidence and examples from the piece that you are analyzing to prove and demonstrate your argument. 

You will be thinking about the decisions an author has made along these lines and thinking about whether these decisions are effective or ineffective.

Basic Questions for a Rhetorical Analysis

SAMPLE RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Seeing rhetorical analysis in action is one of the best ways to understand it. Read the sample rhetorical analysis of an article. If you like, you can read the original article the student analyzes: Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either).

Adapted from “Chapter 16” of English 102: Journey Into Open, 2021, used according to  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License