No one picks up a text, reads it once, and announces a perfect interpretation. Those who seem to analyze texts effortlessly have actually developed an attitude about reading as a process and a practice. In college, you’ll be trained in increasingly advanced techniques and, like an athlete, you’ll need to strengthen your skills of rhetorical interpretation by exercising them vigorously and regularly. A basketball player practices every day, for instance, by staying fit, running drills, being coached, learning techniques, studying film, scrimmaging with teammates, and so forth. Likewise, a successful rhetorical analyst practices reading, noting, thinking, listening, discussing, writing, researching, and consulting with every text.

A Procedure for Rhetorical Analysis

1. Read a text more than once, first to experience it as a reader, then again and again to examine it as an analyst.
2. Note important aspects of the text that make it similar to and different from other texts.
3. Think about the strategies and arguments of the author, and how they relate to your own ideas on a topic.
4. Listen to your instructor’s lecture on the text, opening up your reading to development.
5. Discuss the text and your take on it with classmates.
6. Write about the text, read some peers’ ideas about it, and reflect on all the knowledge you have amassed.
7. Research information on the text, the author, his or her culture, and other criticism.
8. Consult an expert (like your instructor, during office hours) to share and to enhance your understanding of a text.

Always start a rhetorical analysis by knowing your own position and having a sense of direction. Why are you are reading, and what do you hope to gain from reading? What demands does the text make upon you as a reader and responder? An e-mail from your mom or a TV commercial for the ShamWow demands a different set of reading methods than a chapter of your Econ textbook. You don’t listen to your roommate’s stories the same way you listen to your favorite professor’s lectures. Where you stand in the reading context is your own rhetorical situation.

Your reading is situated, and so are the texts you read. Where the text stands within history and culture, who constructed it, why, how, and for whom – this is the text’s rhetorical situation. A close reading of the text itself will reveal some of this information, but you must also research beyond the text to understand its rhetorical situation completely.

Questions for Analyzing Rhetorical Situation

1. What is the author’s primary purpose for composing this text? How does he or she hope the audience will react?
2. What is the primary message communicated?
3. Who is the original intended audience? What might be some of the common expectations of this audience?
4. Are there secondary or unintended audiences to consider?
5. What is the historical time period in which the text was composed?
6. What is the cultural background of the author and his or her initial audience? Consider geographic location, gender, ethnicity, shared beliefs, and discourse communities.
7. What have others said or written about this text or its subject?