Writer’s Corner

Writing the Rhetorical Analysis Paper

Traditional (non-visual) rhetorical analysis is the analysis of the structure of a person’s argument. When you read a complex academic essay and decide to write about that essay, you are performing a rhetorical analysis. In doing so, you follow the same process described for visual literacy essays, moving from ekphrasis to analysis to synthesis. But instead of your “ekphrasis” being a description of a work of art, traditional academic rhetorical analysis requires that you describe the movement of another writer’s argument from point to point.

Why would someone ask you to describe an argument when they could simply read it themselves? As with images and any kind of art, the way a person describes an argument tells you about what they believe is valuable or interesting in an essay. When they misinterpret something the essay says, it tells a reader that the rhetorical analysis writer didn’t understand an aspect of the essay properly, which allows the reader to see the writer’s weaknesses. Once the writer has finished with analysis, they can then apply the ideas they’ve analyzed to areas that the original essay writer didn’t apply them to themselves, which is called “synthesis”.

Ekphrasis > Analysis > Research > Synthesis

How can our work on the “rhetorical analysis of images” help with the more traditional rhetorical analysis of arguments? First, with ekphrasis, we can still think of the essay as something that needs to be described before it can be analyzed. A reader’s understanding of the essay is revealed in the accuracy of their description of the argument.

Then there’s technical rhetorical analysis – like compositional analysis but for an essay – of how the argument is “composed”. In this aspect it might help some people to think of the argument visually: is it balanced or chaotic? Even or uneven? Which lines are the focal points and which simply guide us between them? While in a rhetorical analysis it is not generally necessary to do “research”, because you’re providing your own evaluation of an argument rather than someone else’s, more advanced writers might incorporate other people’s opinions on the essay into their analysis later on that they find in academic journals or book reviews of the essay.

The final stage, synthesis, is about synthesizing something new: it might be a new interpretation of the essay, a new application of the essay’s ideas to some other realm that the essay doesn’t address, and it might be a challenge to the essay’s conclusion or a suggestion of the essay’s limitations. Synthesis is the most difficult and advanced aspect of academic writing and will become important especially with research papers, so it’s a good chance to practice here.

One of the ways I try to give students training in the synthesis aspect of writing using a rhetorical analysis paper is by making my rhetorical analysis assignments look like this:

Perform a rhetorical analysis of W.J.T. Mitchell’s essay and then, using quotes from Mitchell to support your argument, discuss these ideas in reference to an image of your own choosing.

When you do your question analysis for this prompt, you’ll notice that it has two parts. 1) Perform a rhetorical analysis and 2) discuss with reference to an image of your own choosing. In a traditional rhetorical analysis assignment, the second part wouldn’t be there. But it is added here as a chance for the student to synthesize: to apply ideas from the essay they’re analyzing to create original thoughts about a different artwork. The task both allows students to demonstrate they understand the essay well enough to apply its ideas accurately and offers an opportunity for them to synthesize new ideas for themselves.

Hopefully, thinking about the similarities between the rhetorical analysis of images and the rhetorical analysis of essays can allow you to strengthen your skills at both. If one of those is easier to you, think about how you can use skills from the one you’re better at to improve the one that’s more challenging. Or, if you prefer, keep them totally separate and compare them later, after you’ve written them. The only person who can find the strategy that works best for you is you. Just know that analyzing an argument isn’t necessarily all that different from analyzing a painting.