Steps to Draft an Outline for Rhetorical Analysis Essay

Like most literary works, rhetorical analysis essays are written with the sole purpose of persuading the audience about the validity of the author’s point of view. Authors, in order to persuade the audience and reach their goal, use a lot of persuasive strategies and techniques, when starting to write my essay. In a rhetorical analysis essay, your job basically is to analyze how successful the author has entertained or persuaded the audience.

A rhetorical essay is one of the toughest essays to write but for your convenience, I have listed down the steps to develop a rhetorical essay outline. When I was in high school, I followed these steps to write my essays, and trust me they worked great.

• Read the assigned text.

Before creating the outline for your rhetorical analysis essay, you first need to read the text that is assigned to you by your instructor. Because the sole purpose of writing a rhetorical analysis essay is to critically evaluate a text and you can never evaluate a text until you read it carefully. While you are going through the text, keep a pen and paper close to you, so you can note down the valuable information.

• Evaluate the author's strategies.

To create an outline, you need to do the rough work first. After reading the text, it's time to go through the text once again so you can underline the information that the author has provided in the text. Inform your audience who is the author of the text, define his purpose, and his targeted audience. Analyze the connection between the setting and the speech. Once you will find the answers to these basic questions, you can easily analyze the persuasive strategies.

• Look for the rhetorical tactics.

Find where the author has used the three key components of a persuasive text which are ethos, logos, and pathos. Locating them in the text is the most important job that you need to do. But it will not be too difficult to locate as Aristotle has made sure that a persuasive essay always contains these components. One of the three is always there in rhetorical texts so, look carefully.

While locating the ethos, you basically have to find where the authors have targeted the audience’s ethics. Look how he has appealed to ethics. On the other hand, by using pathos the authors evoke the audience’s emotions so, you have to locate the point where the author has said something to receive the audience's reaction. Besides analyzing the author’s tactics, see how the audience has reacted to check if the tactic had any effect on the audience or not.

In logos, the author uses facts to appeal to logic and reason. Analyze if the rationale given by the speaker is considered logical by the audience or not. Check the audience’s reaction, see if they agreed or disagreed with the speaker. If your concept regarding ethos, logos, and pathos is still not clear, you can avail of the best paper writing service by providing a reasonable amount of money to an online essay writer.

• Create the outline.

Now you have read and evaluated the text carefully, it is time to create an outline to organize your findings. The first step in the outline will be the introductory paragraph in which you will introduce the topic, the author, his purpose, and the targeted audience. Besides this, you will also describe the setting depicted in the text. 

After the introduction part, comes the section of body paragraphs. The length and numbers of your body paragraphs will depend upon the text you have been assigned and the tactics that you have to find out. Assign one paragraph to each tactic. The tactics will be discussed after stating the topic sentences.

Then, in the end, write a concluding paragraph in which you will provide the closing thoughts and final commentary. Get online ‘write my essay online’ help if you are still not sure how to create a strong outline.