Academic Writing Guidelines: How to Compose a Rhetorical Analysis Essay
A rhetorical analysis paper is like writing an extended answer to a rhetorical question. You provide detailed information behind your main idea to show your side of what you analyzed. Your paper should have good details to help readers understand what you learned. Composing an essay of this nature will include following guidelines provided by your instructor. The following points offer additional insight on how you can compose a rhetorical analysis essay for your topic.
- The purpose of this essay is to write your content in a way that will provide readers insight on what the creator of the content you are writing about wanted to achieve with their work. Keep this aspect in mind as you write about your topic.
- Understand basic aspects of the content you are writing about. This will include who is speaking, the purpose, intended audience and tone. Review the subject matter of the content.
- What details make the work stand out? Review logic reasoning and details that convey emotion. What elements of the content help readers feel as if they are connected to the work? Review how the content was created such as style, word choice and any patterns that could show how the writer or creator expressed themselves.
- Create an analysis based on information you have collected. You will start determining if and how the author or writer made their appeal to their audience. You can form your opinion and speculate on what the content was presented in this fashion.
- Start writing your paper. You will begin with your introduction which should detail the purpose of the essay. The reading audience needs to know this is a rhetoric essay. Define what details you are analyzing by providing a brief summary of what you just reviewed. You will also mention the information you needed to identify earlier including the speaker, tone, intended audience and occasion of the subject matter.
- Define your thesis statement in the intro. This is basically the focus of your work.
- The body of the essay should feature rhetorical appeals. Each paragraph should detail an appeal based on what you analyzed about the work. Talk about how this information affects the intended audience. This information should be in logic order written in third person.
- Conclude work by restating thesis and supporting details. Mention if additional research should be done.