AP English Language · Free-response skill

Rhetorical analysis: how style serves a purpose

The move. Explain how a writer’s diction, comparisons and sentence patterns create a tone that moves a specific audience toward the writer’s purpose.

How to do it

  1. Start with the situation: who is writing, to whom, and what the writer wants those readers to do or believe. Every choice you analyze should connect back to that purpose.
  2. Pick choices you can quote. Quote a few words, name the choice in plain terms (word choice, a comparison, a sentence pattern, a shift in tone), and spend most of your sentence on its effect.
  3. Explain the effect in two steps: what the choice makes the reader see or feel, and why that feeling helps the writer with this particular audience.
  4. A thesis for this essay names the writer’s purpose and the main choices that serve it, in one sentence, rather than listing every device you noticed.

Practice prompt Try it

The following is from an original letter to a town newspaper, written for Peakscor practice; the writer and the town are fictional. Council member Ruth Okafor wrote it a week before residents of Millbrook vote on a bond to repair the town pool, which has been closed for three summers.

When I was nine, the Millbrook pool was the town’s back porch. Mothers read paperbacks on the cracked blue deck. Lifeguards blew their whistles at boys who ran, and the boys ran anyway. Farmers jumped in after haying, their boots left by the fence. A pool is where a town learns to share the shallow end. A pool is where a shy kid learns that the deep end will hold her up.

Walk past it today. The gate is chained. Leaves fill the deep end, and a sign wired to the fence says CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, as if notice were a season that might arrive on its own.

It will not. Notice is us. On Tuesday, vote yes on the pool bond, and give the next nine-year-old a summer worth remembering.

Read the letter. Then answer each part in one to three sentences.

  1. Name the readers the writer is trying to reach, and say what she wants them to do.
  2. Name the writer’s attitude toward the old pool in the letter’s first paragraph (the one that begins “When I was nine”). Then quote words from that paragraph, other than “the town’s back porch,” that describe the old pool or the people at it.
  3. The writer calls the pool “the town’s back porch.” Say what this comparison suggests about the place the pool had in the town.
  4. Two sentences in a row in the first paragraph begin with the same words. Quote those shared opening words up to and including the word “where,” and name one thing the two sentences say people learned at the pool.
  5. Write one thesis sentence for an essay about the letter. It should name the writer’s purpose and either the back-porch comparison or the repeated sentence opening you discussed above.

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 9 points

Model answer, annotated

(a) She is writing to the residents of Millbrook who will vote on Tuesday, and she wants them to vote yes on the bond to repair the pool.

  • Point 1 Names the town’s voters as the audience.
  • Point 2 States the action she wants: a yes vote on the pool bond.

(b) Her attitude toward the old pool is fond. She lingers on small, homely details such as mothers reading “on the cracked blue deck.”

  • Point 3 Names a positive attitude: fond.
  • Point 4 Quotes “on the cracked blue deck,” words from the first paragraph that describe the old pool.

(c) Calling the pool the town’s back porch suggests it was a common gathering place, somewhere neighbors spent easy time together the way a family does on its porch.

  • Point 5 Says the pool was a common, homelike place where neighbors spent time together.

(d) Both sentences begin “A pool is where.” They say a shy kid learned at the pool that the deep end would hold her up.

  • Point 6 Quotes the repeated opening words.
  • Point 7 Names one thing learned at the pool: that the deep end will hold a swimmer up.

(e) To win yes votes on the pool bond, Ruth Okafor calls the old pool “the town’s back porch,” so voters see its closing as the loss of a shared gathering place they can restore.

  • Point 8 Names the purpose: winning yes votes on the bond.
  • Point 9 Names the back-porch comparison by quoting it.