English 112

Fall 2010
Essay 2: Rhetorical Analysis
For this essay, you will choose one of the essays weve read in the past few
weeksLetter from Birmingham Jail, Vivisection, or From Students, Less
Kindness from Strangers?and analyze its use of one rhetorical technique,
particularly in terms of how this technique affects the essays meaning, either
in part or as a whole. You may wish to understand this technique in terms of
its appeal to logos, ethos, and/or pathos.
Getting started: I recommend that you begin by choosing the text you wish to write
about and then re-reading it. After youve done this, choose one technique that
stands out to you. For example, in Birmingham Jail, MLK repeatedly uses parallel
structure in his sentences. An essay could focus on Kings use of such a structure. In
Vivisection, Lewis refers to a literary critic and a Shakespeare play to make an
argument about what is commonly understood as a scientific, not a literary, issue. In
this case, an essay could examine Lewiss use of this example and its implications.
Or, in From Students you might examine Pauls use of a sociologists words as
authority for the claims shes making.
After youve chosen your text and the rhetorical strategy employed by its author, get
to work. Find multiple examples of this strategy and write them down. (If you only
have one example, as with Lewiss Shakespeare quote, you may have to think not
about a repeated rhetorical strategy but how a single strategy is affects the text as a
whole.) For each example, give its context and then summarize it. Then, using the

questions on p. 66 of A Writers Reference, begin to analyze the example youve

quoted, considering how the examples style contributes to its meaning, especially
how it might be an example appealing to logos, ethos, or pathos.
DUE DATES:
For THURSDAY, 9/30, bring to class writing in which you analyze a few examples
(between three and five) from your chosen text, or in which you analyze how one
example has implications carried throughout the text. I expect this will be between
three to five paragraphs long.
For TUESDAY, 10/5, bring two copies of a working draft to class. The requirements
for this working draft will be discussed Thursday.
The FINAL DRAFT is due TUESDAY, 10/12.
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Here is an example of the kind of analysis this assignment is asking you to perform.
As you can see, the following two paragraphs were sustained by one example of a
rhetorical technique used by the author:
In the fourth paragraph of Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. caps
off a short argument explaining why he came to Birmingham to fight for civil rights by
stating, Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. This kind of parallel
structure is something that King uses regularly throughout the letter, and it echoes in its
structure several well-known scriptural passages. One example is from the Psalms: For the
LORD knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall perish" (Ps. 1.6).
Another comes from the New Testament: Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you (Lk. 6.31). Kings use of such a structural device gives his claimespecially given its

concern about justicean authority akin to the Scriptures themselves, documents the
clergymen in his audience would take seriously. Such a strategy helps bolster Kings ethical
credibility.
In addition to its similarity to passages from the Bible, Kings use of parallelism
helps us see, or hear, how closely errors appear to the truth, and how radically different.
The word injustice is merely one syllable away from justice, but this small difference has
vast implications. Using this small difference, King argues that tolerating a small error in
thinking risks destroying the larger moral order. This, too, might appeal to his audiences
theological concerns, who understand that the nature of humanity has been tragically
affected by such small errors. As the Apostle Paul, whom King quotes in his essay, puts it,
[T]hrough one man sin entered the world (Rom. 5.12).