Mike Rose’s “I Just Wanna Be Average” (123)

3rd Essay: Rhetorical Analysis Prompt and Outline

Rhetoric is the study of how writers use words to influence an audience. A rhetorical analysis is an essay that breaks a work of non-fiction into parts and then explains how the parts work together to create a certain effect—whether to persuade, entertain or inform. In this prompt

, you will identify how an author uses establishes an argument using rhetorical appeals to establish his claim.

In writing an effective rhetorical analysis, you should do prewriting, considering the goal or purpose of author’s piece; This will help you identify the appeals, evidence, and techniques used and why; examples of those appeals are ethos, pathos, and logos— evidence, techniques and your explanation of why they are or are not credible. A good place to start is to look at each of these considerations in a sentence or two on scratch paper with a quotation to figure out which appeal applies. You might find that there is more than one appeal per paragraph. Just identify one per quotation.

What is an appeal? An appeal is where the author attempts to earn audience approval or agreement by playing to natural human tendencies or common experience. There are three kinds of appeals: the pathetic, the ethical, and the logical or pathos, ethos, and logos.

You are to identify how one of the writer’s from Rereading America implements the devices to establish his or her claim to determine the validity of the argument.