The art of good rhetorical analysis

Rhetoric is a term affiliated with analysis of words on a page, paragraphs in a paper, or lines in a speech. Many many people use rhetoric in their daily lives and don't think twice about it. Some of it is done very carefully with painstaking detail, and others not so much, but rhetorical analysis has the ability to reveal things which would otherwise not be so apparent.

By analyzing a writer's work using rhetorical analysis, it helps the audience to better understand the point the writer was trying to convey in the content of the piece. What context the work was done under (and for what target audience) are important things to consider when analyzing writing. The style of the piece as how it is organized can also reveal alot about the true motives behind the work. A good example I can think of this are the 'truth' ads, an anti-tobacco smoking propaganda campaign in the United States. Some of the ads have clearly targeted specific groups, such as urban dwellers or teenagers, and this can readily be seen by the characters and scenarios portrayed in some of the ads. A rhetorical analysis of these ads would likely reveal that the ads were using situations (context) that would be familiar to the audience (teens/city folk) so that they could better understand the message the ads were attempting to communicate (do not smoke).

I believe that rhetorical analysis does offer more than simply intellectual exercise. In sticking with the truth ads example, I am sure that many people were working on the ads using this very same line of thinking/analysis to see what best would appeal to the targeted audience. In a a broader sense this is what the entire commercial industry does, attempt to target audiences by finding things that they know the audience will be able to easily relate to. Rhetorical analysis can be useful in this way, as well as for analyzing many other texts and documents with targeted demographics.