AP English Language · Free-response skill

Read the situation, then explain a choice

The move. Identify a speech’s audience, request and exigence, then explain what one specific choice shows the audience about the speaker.

How to do it

  1. Start every rhetorical analysis by reading the situation: who is speaking, to whom, on what occasion, and to get the audience to do or believe what. The answers usually sit in the introduction and in the first and last lines.
  2. Then take one choice at a time. Name it or quote it exactly, say what it shows or does for this audience, and stop. One clear effect, stated plainly, is worth more than a list of labels.
  3. Write the effect out in full. “This is logos” is a label. “By giving the number of families turned away from the food bank last winter, the director hands the board a fact it can check, so her request looks practical” is analysis.
  4. Keep each part short: answer the question asked in one to three sentences.

Practice prompt Try it

Original passage written for Peakscor practice. Alma Ruiz, who has driven a school bus in Dunmore County for fourteen years, gave this speech to the Dunmore County commissioners at their meeting on May 3. On May 10 the commissioners will vote on whether to lower the speed limit on Quarry Road, where her bus makes six stops, from 50 to 35 miles per hour.

Commissioners, I drive Bus 12. Every school morning at 7:10, I stop at the bottom of the hill on Quarry Road, put out my stop sign, and wait while two second graders cross to my door. And every morning I watch my mirror, because cars come over that hill at fifty and cannot see my bus until they are almost on top of it.

Twice this spring, a driver has passed my stopped bus with the sign out. Twice.

I know a lower limit will add a minute or two to some people’s drive to work. I drive that road on weekends too, and I don’t enjoy slowing down any more than you do. But a minute is what it costs to see a stopped bus in time. I am asking you to vote yes on 35.

Read the speech, then answer each part in one to three sentences.

  1. Who is Ruiz speaking to?
  2. What does Ruiz ask her listeners to do?
  3. What coming event gives Ruiz a reason to speak at this meeting?
  4. Ruiz begins with “I drive Bus 12” and then describes her stop on Quarry Road. What does this opening tell the commissioners about how she knows what happens at that stop?

Write each part, then check yourself against the checklist. Nothing you type here is saved or graded.

Check yourself and see a model answer

Checklist

Our own checklist of what a full answer does, one line per point. Tick each one your response earns.

0 of 4 points

Model answer, annotated

(a) Ruiz is speaking to the Dunmore County commissioners at their May 3 meeting.

  • Point 1 Names the audience: the Dunmore County commissioners.

(b) She asks them to vote yes on lowering the speed limit on Quarry Road from 50 to 35 miles per hour.

  • Point 2 States her request: vote yes on lowering the limit to 35.

(c) The commissioners will vote on May 10 on whether to lower the Quarry Road speed limit, so she speaks at the meeting a week before that vote.

  • Point 3 Names the coming vote on the Quarry Road speed limit.

(d) The opening tells them she knows from her own experience: she drives Bus 12 and stops at the bottom of that hill every school morning, so she has watched the cars come over the hill herself.

  • Point 4 Says she knows from her own experience as the driver who stops there every morning.