What does it mean to analyze?

Analysis is “the process of methodically breaking something down to gain a better understanding of it. Analysis also includes the ability to connect pieces of information as the basis for generalization or explanation” (“What is Analysis?” par. 1). As a  skill, analysis involves “breaking something down and taking a close look at each of its parts while looking for themes, patterns, and assumptions” (“What is Analysis” Figure 1). Developing and practicing a skill such as this is foundational to creating complex arguments and communicating critically with others and in our communities. We perform analysis just about every day in our interactions with people, places, materials, and digital interactions.

While each academic discipline approaches the analytic process a bit differently, the essential skills of analysis are the following:

1. 1. Breaking down information or artifacts into parts
   2. Uncovering relationships among those parts
   3. Determining motives, causes, and underlying assumptions
   4. Making inferences and finding evidence to support generalizations

These all work in conjunction with one another to present critically sound insight on an idea, movement, argument, film, painting, place, or other object of analysis.

What is written analysis?

In the two previous chapters, we have give you language and tools for rhetorically analyzing texts written by other speakers and to leverage to make your own texts more affective/effective. In this chapter, we will talk about writing analysis. Analysis is similar to expository writing, which you did in Unit 2, but it involves deeper interpretation and deeper levels of description to unpack meaning for your reader. Written analysis is a thought journey. It involves thinking through a thing in a structured way that allows your reader to think through a thing with you. It includes:

• The breakdown of information into separate components
• A comprehensive analysis of these components, as well as initial information in general
• The restoration of missing information through logical inferences and critical thinking

This is an example of analytical writing:

“In Shelly’s ‘Ozymandias,’ a traveller describes a shattered statue, abandoned to sink in the desert. He begins building the image of the statue in the reader’s mind by emphasizing its size, referring to it as “colassal” and “vast.” Early in the poem, this description serves to create a sense of grandness and majesty for the statue and the ruler’s story, but later it will create the sense that even incredible achievements will be lost to time.”  (Credit: WikiHow)

Remember, analysis is not the same as argument. Argument focuses on persuading an audience to accept a particular viewpoint, while analysis focuses on examining and understanding something by breaking it down into its component parts. An argumentative essay aims to convince, while an analytical essay aims to explain and interpret. In a rhetorical analysis, you might analyze someone else’s argument, but you yourself are writing an analysis. 

One of the biggest differences between an argumentative essay and an analytical essay is the kind of thesis you will write. Argumentative thesis statements articulate a claim about a thing and reasons/evidence the audience should believe the claim. Analytical thesis statements identify for the reader what kind of thinking the writer will be doing, what they will be thinking about, and how they will do it.

Ex. Argumentative Thesis Statement + Trajectory: “City council members should have their terms limited to prevent one group or party from maintaining control indefinitely. In this essay, I will use historical case studies, legislative records, and interviews with local officials to demonstrate the dangers of unlimited seat occupancy and the positive energy of change.”

Ex. Analytical Thesis Statement + Trajectory: “Through close examination of three historical case studies, I seek to understand how one party might come to control a council indefinitely, the implications of stagnated legislation for city institutions and citizens, and potential avenues for locals to organize and overcome these challenges.”

What does it mean to write a rhetorical analysis?

Remember, rhetoric is a mechanic. It is how communication works. A rhetorical analysis essay, therefore, examines how components of a text work individually and with each other to appeal to an audience, carry a certain message, and achieve a particular goal. Many rhetorical analysis essays focus on the speaker’s intent and how they have chosen to compose/design their piece. Other rhetorical analysis essay focus on affect and how audiences are impacted by a piece according to or regardless of speaker intent. The key to rhetorical analysis is that the text’s components are taken apart and analyzed for their affect within their rhetorical situation.

A rhetorical analysis essay will need to:

• focus on a specific text
• describe the text’s specific rhetorical situation (speaker, audience, purpose, context)
• examine individual rhetorical components and their specific appeals (ethos, logos, pathos) to their specific audience(s)
• discuss the text’s affect/effects

The key to writing rhetorical analysis is to focus on the text and the text’s speaker, audience, components, and contexts. It is easy as a student to get caught up in the argument or topic and begin arguing your own position. Doing that, though, means you are writing a position paper and not a rhetorical analysis paper. Try to stay focused on each rhetorical component individually, how that component functions within the text, and how it functions in regard to the target audience. 

Writing about text components

Breaking down a text into its components and explaining how those components work individually and all together is a complicated business. We suggest the following steps for writing rhetorical analysis: identify, describe, and interpret. The following examples are based on examination of “The Ciguapa” by Kelly Fernandez in Tales from La Vida: A Latinx Comic Anthology by Frederick Luis Aldama.

Step 1) IDENTIFY the excerpt or particular part of the text you are looking at.

Ex. “In the fourth cell from the end of the comic strip, Fernandez figures herself in the foreground and La Ciguapa emerging from the forest in the background.”

Step 2) DESCRIBE the specific excerpt in context for the reader. Remember, you want to do this strategically in a way that leads neatly into your analysis.

Ex. “The artist’s expression is afraid: her eyes are large, her mouth parted, her face marked by stress lines. Their shape, size, and high contrast make the whites of her eyes the focus of the cell and the first element the viewer sees. The viewer registers second, because of its high contrast, the black and white figure of La Ciguapa coming up behind Fernandez’s terrified figure. La Ciguapa remains featureless in this cell, only expressionless black eyes against ghostly pale skin, her long limbs reaching, her hands like claws.”

Step 3) INTERPRET how the parts of the excerpt work on the reader and how this achieves or does not achieve the speaker’s larger goal

Ex. “This cell is the height of the comic’s action, the height of its tension and emotion. The viewer knows and fears what is going to happen. This is also the height of La Ciguapa’s strangeness and monstrosity, the moment before Fernandez begins to recognize who the woman-ghost is. It is significant because of its intense emotion and because it shows the reader their own terror. It shows us our fear of the unknown and fear of those who have been made into monsters.”

Writing your introduction and thesis

Rhetorical analysis essays tend to begin by introducing a text and its rhetorical situation informed by research. Introductions tend to identify:

• who the speaker is and their motivation
• who the intended audience is
• what kind of text it is (i.e. medium), its genre, and how it moved (circulation)
• what was happening in the world that motivated the text and/or what larger conversations it was part of (context)

Please know rhetorical analysis introductions don’t always do all of these things. A student or scholar might use textual components to uncover a writer’s purpose or understand who their intended audience is. In those cases, the writer will use the introduction to lay the contextual groundwork necessary to ask those questions.

Here is an example of a researched rhetorical analysis introduction and thesis statement. Notice how the introduction clearly establishes the text’s specific and researched rhetorical situation and builds analysis from it:

“Sojourner Truth first presented what has become known as her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851. This analysis is based on a transcript of her speech published a few weeks afterward by Marion Robinson in the Anti-Slavery Bugle (Podell). It is documented that Truth worked with Robinson on this transcript and approved its publication. These two different venues, the convention and the newspaper, tell us about Truth’s intended audiences and about her goals as a speaker. At the Woman’s Rights Convention, Truth was primarily addressing White women and men gathered “to consider the Rights, Duties, and Relations of Women” (Proceedings 2). This state conference included reports on education, labor, and common law, as well as letters from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer. The Anti-Slavery Bugle was the newspaper of American minister and abolitionist Marius Robinson (Podell). It operated out of Salem, Ohio and circulated primarily in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and western Pennsylvania. Presented ten years before the outbreak of the Civil War, sixty years before women in the U.S. would gain the right to vote, Truth spoke at a moment of national tension, anxiety, hope, and anger. In this speech and others, she sought to align the interests of abolitionists and suffragettes. In this essay, I will examine how Truth makes herself legible to her audience of both abolitionists and suffragettes through gendered syllogisms and Biblical allusions, creating common ground through strategic parallelism and diction that highlights similarities in their positions and interests.”

Body paragraphs in a rhetorical analysis

If I were to flesh out this essay about Sojourner Truth, my body paragraph organization might look something like this:

• Paragraph 2: introduction to legibility and why it mattered historically (identifying appeal to speaker ethos and context)
• Paragraph 3: how Truth does gendered syllogisms to do legibility (analysis of text components and naming rhetorical devices)
• Paragraph 4: how Truth does Biblical allusions  to do legibility (analysis of text components and naming rhetorical devices)
• Paragraph 5: introduction to common ground and why it mattered historically (identifying appeal to audience ethos and context)
• Paragraph 6: how Truth does parallelism to do common positions and interests (analysis of text components and naming rhetorical devices)
• Paragraph 7: how Truth does diction  to do common positions and interests (analysis of text components and naming rhetorical devices)

Notice how my paragraphs follow the order laid out in my thesis statement. My body paragraphs might then look something like this:

Paragraph 2 would explain what legibility means in a 19th century setting when racist and sexist beliefs ran rampant. “Legibility” means a speaker is “hearable” and “understandable” because they speak “clearly” and “rationally.” Women were often deemed less rational and, therefore, less legible speakers who could not be taken seriously and should not hold positions of power. Racialized and minoritized communities like African Americans were also believed to be  irrational and therefore incapable of reason, logic, and argumentation. Beliefs in less-rational and more-primitive Others were used historically to justify the enslavement, colonization, genocide, and oppression of bodies that weren’t Anglo American or Anglo European (and also not “masculine”) across the Western hemisphere. Sojourner Truth therefore had to prove her legibility to her audience as both a woman and as a Black American.

Paragraph 6 would identify a handful of parallelisms Truth offers. It would quote each and describe why they can be considered parallelisms. It would then explain each sets’ affects on audiences and how they create commonality across Truth’s target audience. For example, in the last sentence, Truth says: “But man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between-a hawk and a buzzard.” This deceptively simple sentence works in multiple ways. First, it identifies for women and the enslaved a common enemy, pitting them together against the same force that oppress them. Next, it identifies common activity by likening both to birds of prey. Finally, it implies a common direction or goal: both are moving against this enemy. Both are rising up. Both, together, will consume that which oppresses them.

Concluding a rhetorical analysis

Like most conclusions, a rhetorical analysis conclusion would begin with a review or re-articulation of the essay’s main points. There are then several moves a conclusion for a rhetorical analysis can make:

1. Evaluate the piece’s efficacy of speaker’s argument and appeals to their audience by researching and/or inferring how audiences respond. If you are researching a 21st century text, you can easily find comments, reviews, reposts, and other responses online. This is also your opportunity to voice your opinion on the text and whether you think it accomplishes its goal.
2. Explain the piece’s exigence and why it matters/mattered. What did the piece accomplish? Why was it important within its context and how has it impacted communities, events, or  discourse today?
3. Reflect on your response to the piece by figuring yourself as a member of its audience. How did the piece move you? Where did it fail and why? Who else might it resonate with?