A Rhetorical Analysis Essay Example, Annotated

What this example is, and why the source text is invented

Most rhetorical analysis examples online analyse a famous speech and quote four lines of it. That is close to useless as a model, because you cannot check the analysis against the text — you have to take the writer’s word for what the speech does, which is the one thing you are supposed to be learning to judge.

So the text analysed below is printed in full, and it is invented for this page. Nothing in it is a real statement by a real school or person. That is deliberate twice over: you can verify every claim the analysis makes by looking a few inches up the page, and nothing here misrepresents anything anyone actually said.

The companion piece in this blog, *what is a rhetorical analysis essay*, covers the method — the appeals, the rhetorical situation, how to build a thesis. This page is the artifact. If you are starting from scratch, read that one first and come back to this.

The text being analysed

A letter sent to parents, roughly 190 words. Read it before the analysis — you will spot several of the moves yourself, which is the point.

To parents and carers,

Following a number of incidents last term, a decision has been taken to restrict mobile phone use at Ashmoor during the school day, beginning in September.

I want to be honest that this will be inconvenient for some families, and I understand why. Many of you rely on being able to reach your child during the day, and that is a reasonable thing to want. We have not taken this lightly.

But the corridors at breaktime have changed. Staff describe a significant number of students spending their free time alone with a screen rather than with each other, and colleagues across the sector report the same pattern. Whatever we think about phones in lessons, the unstructured part of the day is where this is being felt.

Ashmoor has always been a school that takes community seriously. We would be failing that commitment if we noticed this and did nothing.

The policy will be reviewed in the spring, and the office will remain available for urgent messages throughout the day. Details follow next week.

R. Okonkwo, Headteacher

The thesis the analysis argues

Before the essay itself, the claim it is built on — because a rhetorical analysis thesis is the part people most often get wrong, and seeing it isolated helps:

The letter’s persuasive work is done almost entirely by its concessions. By conceding inconvenience early and specifically, while keeping the evidence for the policy vague and the agency for the decision unattributed, it converts a contestable administrative choice into an expression of a value the audience already holds — and leaves parents with nothing concrete to dispute.

Note what it does. It claims something about the technique, not about whether phone bans are a good idea. It is contestable — a reader could argue the vagueness undermines the letter rather than protecting it. And it predicts the body paragraphs: concession, vagueness, agency, values.

The analysis, in full

Introduction. A letter announcing an unpopular policy has a harder job than a letter defending one, because its audience has not yet decided to argue and the letter must not give them a reason to start. Ashmoor’s phone letter is a careful piece of work by that standard. Its persuasive weight falls almost entirely on its concessions: by conceding inconvenience early and in specific terms, while keeping its evidence vague and the authorship of the decision unattributed, it reframes a contestable administrative choice as the expression of a value its readers already hold, and leaves them very little that can be disputed.

The concession as the central move. The letter concedes before it argues, and the order matters. The second paragraph grants the objection — “this will be inconvenient”, “many of you rely on being able to reach your child” — and grants it in the parent’s own terms rather than in the school’s. Naming the specific worry, contact during the day, rather than a general inconvenience, is what makes it read as understanding rather than as a formula. The effect is an ethos move: a writer who has anticipated your objection is one who has thought about you, and a reader who feels anticipated is a reader less inclined to write back. It also forecloses. An objection already acknowledged by the author is awkward to raise as though it were new, so the concession does the work of a rebuttal without the letter having to produce one.

Evidence kept deliberately soft. Against the specificity of the concession, the case for the policy is strikingly unquantified. “A number of incidents”, “a significant number of students”, “colleagues across the sector report the same pattern.” No figure appears anywhere in the letter. Read as argument this is weak, and a hostile reader would notice immediately. Read as rhetoric it is defensive: a number invites challenge, and a parent who disputes a statistic has a foothold, whereas a parent who disputes “a significant number” is arguing with an impression. The appeal to what staff and the wider sector have observed substitutes professional consensus for data, which is an ethos appeal standing in for a logos one — and for an audience disposed to trust the school, it costs nothing.

Agency, and who decided. The letter’s most revealing sentence is its first: “a decision has been taken.” The passive construction removes the decider, and nothing in the letter puts one back — it is not until the signature that a person appears at all. Set against the first person elsewhere (“I want to be honest”, “we have not taken this lightly”), the pattern is consistent rather than careless. The first person is used for the sympathy and the reassurance; the passive is used for the decision itself. The consequence is that the policy arrives as a settled fact that the headteacher is helping parents through, rather than as a choice she made and could be argued out of. There is no one in the text to address an appeal to.

The appeal to identity. The penultimate paragraph does the one thing the rest of the letter avoids, and makes a direct claim: “Ashmoor has always been a school that takes community seriously.” It is unfalsifiable and it is not offered as evidence — its function is to make the policy a consequence of something the reader has already bought. Disagreeing now means either disputing the school’s self-description or accepting that the school should have noticed a problem and ignored it. The sentence that follows closes the trap politely: “we would be failing that commitment if we noticed this and did nothing.” Inaction has been named as the only alternative, and it has been made shameful.

Conclusion. What makes the letter effective is not any single appeal but the division of labour between them: specificity spent on the concession, vagueness retained for the evidence, agency withheld from the decision, and a value supplied at the point where a justification would otherwise be required. The cost of this strategy is that it works best on readers already inclined to trust the institution. A parent who is not — who wants to know how many incidents, and who decided — will find that the letter has been written so as not to answer them, and the care that reassures one audience reads to the other as evasion. The review promised for the spring is the letter’s acknowledgement of that: a concession not to the objection it answers, but to the one it does not.

What each paragraph is doing

The structural choices worth stealing, paragraph by paragraph.

The introduction gives the rhetorical situation in one sentence rather than a paragraph — who the audience is and why the task is difficult — and lands the thesis last. It does not open by summarising the letter, which is the commonest wasted opening in these essays.

Each body paragraph is organised by a strategy, not by an appeal. There is no paragraph labelled “ethos” and no paragraph labelled “pathos”. The appeals are named where they explain something and left out where they do not, which is what stops the essay becoming a checklist with examples attached.

The body order is argumentative, not textual. It does not walk through the letter top to bottom. It opens with the concession because that is the thesis’s central claim, and holds the identity appeal until last because that paragraph is where the strategy is most exposed.

Quotation is short and frequent. Three or four words at a time, embedded in the sentence. Count the ratio: roughly one line of quotation to five of analysis. Weak rhetorical analyses invert that, and the inversion is visible at a glance before a marker has read a word.

The conclusion names the cost. It says who the strategy fails on and why, which is a genuine finding rather than a summary — and it uses the last sentence to reread one detail, the spring review, in light of everything established. That is the strongest available ending for an analytical essay and almost nobody uses it.

The weak version of the same paragraph

More instructive than the good one, because this is what most first drafts look like. Here is the agency paragraph written badly:

The author uses passive voice in this letter. For example, she says “a decision has been taken to restrict mobile phone use at Ashmoor during the school day, beginning in September.” This is an example of passive voice because the subject is not doing the action. She also uses first person in other parts of the letter, such as “I want to be honest” and “we have not taken this lightly.” This shows that the author is trying to connect with the reader and seem more relatable, which makes the letter more persuasive and effective for its audience.

Four faults, all typical:

It names the device and stops. “This is an example of passive voice because the subject is not doing the action” is a definition, not an analysis. It tells the marker you can identify a construction, which is not what is being assessed.

The quotation is too long and does no work. Twenty-two words quoted to make a point about two of them. The good version quotes four — “a decision has been taken” — because those four are the evidence.

It notices the pattern and does not explain it. The weak version spots both the passive and the first person and concludes only that the author wants to seem relatable. The strong version asks *which* parts get which voice, finds that the split is consistent, and draws the consequence: there is nobody in the text to appeal to.

It ends on filler. “More persuasive and effective for its audience” could be appended to any sentence in any rhetorical analysis ever written. Persuasive how, of whom, at what cost — those are the questions the paragraph was supposed to answer.

How to use this on your own text

Do not copy the structure wholesale — the paragraphs above exist because that letter does those things, and your text will do different things. What transfers is the method.

Read the text twice, the second time asking only what is this trying to make me feel or accept, and how. Mark every place where the register shifts: a change of person, a sudden specificity, a sudden vagueness, a value asserted without support. Those shifts are nearly always where the rhetorical work is happening.

Then write the thesis before any body paragraphs, in the shape: *the text achieves [effect] by [strategy], which works or fails because of [something about the audience]*. If you cannot complete that sentence, you have not found the argument yet, and writing paragraphs will not help you find it.

Then group your marked observations by strategy, drop any that do not serve the thesis however clever they are, and order the survivors by what builds your case — not by where they appear in the text.