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In a rhetorical analysis paper, you will be analyzing the ways that a specific work tries to convince an audience of its argument. It is important to remember that you are not debating whether a work’s argument is right or wrong. You are just breaking down the work to understand how the speaker is trying to convince their audience. 

Things to establish early in your paper

• What is the work you are discussing?
  • Who is the author/speaker?
  • What is the work’s title?
  • When was it created?
  • Any other necessary context you want to provide
• Provide a brief description/summary of the work
• What is the work’s main argument? What are they trying to convince the audience to do?
• Who is the intended audience for this work?
• Was the work successful at convincing the audience? Why or why not?

Base your discussion around the rhetorical appeals: ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos. Typically, you will spend one or more paragraphs per each appeal, and only discuss one appeal per paragraph. In that paragraph, you should:

• Identify the appeal being discussed and how that appeal is is shown in the work you are analyzing
• Give examples from the work
• Explain how that specific feature helps influence the audience and makes the work’s argument more successful. 

Ethos

Ethos is the appeal to credibility. Anything that the creator does to encourage the audience to trust their viewpoint can be considered ethos. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Mentioning personal experience
• Including information from credible sources
• Celebrity appearances (mostly for advertising)
• Affiliations with trustworthy or well-known organizations

Pathos

Pathos is the appeal to emotion. Anything that the creator does to encourage (or not encourage) a specific emotional response in the audience can be considered pathos. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Creating a particular tone in the writing or speech (formal, casual)
• Using word choice that could be more emotionally impactful (sad vs devastating)
• Music choice in videos
• Including personal stories that invoke a particular emotion
• Humor
• Figurative language

Logos

Logos is the appeal to logic. Anything that the creator does to prove their argument or help it make sense to the audience can be considered logos. Often referred to as “facts and stats,” this includes, but is not limited to

• Using facts and statistics to give evidence for their argument
• Presenting information in tables or graphs to present the information more concisely
• Arguments that clearly connect to form a conclusion
• A lack of logical fallacies

Kairos

Kairos focuses on the timeliness of the argument. Anything that the creator does to ensure that the work is suitable for the time it was released can be considered a use of kairos. This will often be a briefer section of your analysis, and is sometimes not required depending on the assignment. Kairos will often consider the audience and the situation that the work is being presented to in order to align with their potential beliefs and concerns

Examples: 

• Creating a sense of urgency for the audience to solve a problem
  • “This offer is only available for the next 20 minutes.”
  • “This limited edition product will be going away soon. Try it today!”
  • “We only have a few more years to prevent climate change.”
• Matching the content of the work to sentiments of the time
  • Releasing a “spookier” advertisement close to Halloween
  • Political campaign ads airing just before election day
• Addressing a recent concern that might be on the minds of the audience

Topic Selection

For a Rhetorical Analysis paper, you will typically need to select one piece of media to focus on for your whole analysis. Depending on your specific assignment, this could be a video advertisement, print advertisement, Ted Talk, speech, journal article, or other type of media that your professor requires. Always refer to your assignment instructions for specific information on the requirements. 

Remember that for a rhetorical analysis, the actual topic of the media does not matter as much as how they present their information and try to persuade the audience. Look for works that have interesting ways of persuading the audience. 

Video advertisements can easily be found on YouTube by searching with terms like “advertisements” or “[Company Name] ad” 

Ted Talks can be found on the Ted website at https://www.ted.com/talks or on the Ted or TedX YouTube channels. 

Journal articles can be found for free on the KCC library databases at https://kcc.libguides.com/articles. We recommend beginning with Academic Search Complete, since it hosts articles on a wide variety of subjects.