Practice Rhetorical Analysis Prompts with Commentary
Note: This is the lowest scoring essay ever on the AP English Language Exam. The average score out of 9 was a 3! But you can all do far better than that!
Step 1: Read the passage and identifyHazlitt’s position on money.
This is where many people went wrong in the actual exam. They read line two’s phrase “To be in want of it [money]” as to desire money, and then went on to write essays about how greed is bad and ruins people’s lives. That is not at all what Hazlitt is saying. In this context, “want” means “lack of.” His position on money is that a person cannot live a good life without it. Being poor dooms you to be miserable in pretty much all aspects of life.
Step 2: Come up with rhetorical strategies that you think are most crucial in helping Hazlitt make his point.
The best answers are going to include at least some of the following:
- The extremely lengthy second sentence, which is composed of many independent clauses joined by semi-colons. He could have easily split this into multiple sentences, so the choice to keep it as one is pretty clearly deliberate. That seemingly endless sentence gives the reader the sense that the misfortunes never end. Every time you think you’ve gotten to a stopping point or an end, it continues (and gets worse!).
- The repetition of “or” in the clauses of the long sentence. The word “or” often signals that one has two different options. Hazlitt here is saying if one is poor, yes, he still has options, but they are all bad.
- The irony of the last sentence. This is not Hazlitt saying it will all have been worth it in the end because you will get recognized as a genius. Quite the opposite. He is saying something along the lines of people will only praise and give you money when you are dead and it can’t help you anymore.
Good Sample Thesis: In this excerpt from “On the Want of Money,” William Hazlitt argues that a lack of money dooms one to a miserable life and an inglorious death. The extraordinarily long sentence structure with its relentless polysyndeton mirrors the hopeless struggle of the impoverished, and gives the reader a sense of Hazlitt’s frustration with those who take the benefits of money for granted.
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Step 1: Read the passage and identify Price’s view of the United States culture.
This step proved difficult for many people. Price doesn’t state her view outright, and some people also struggled with the tone, which is pretty important in determining her view. Overall, Price sees the culture of the 1950s as somewhat shallow, materialistic, and obnoxious. However, she is not terribly critical of it. You can tell this by her rather lighthearted tone and the fact that she gives the American people a kind of excuse for their materialism and fascination with loud colors—they had just come out of the Great Depression.
Step 2: Come up with rhetorical strategies that you think are most crucial in helping Price make her views clear.
This step was challenging for many students because there are not many obvious rhetorical devices. The best answers includedsomething along the lines of the following:
- Something about her humor. The puns are a good example of this almost whimsical tone (Line 1: “The pink flamingo splashed in the fifties” or line 4: “Americans had been flocking to Florida” or even the title: “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: a Natural History.”) You can even pick up some of the humor in her use of italics (Lines 2-3: “First, it was a flamingo,” and later in line 30: “And the flamingo was pink.”), or in questions like Line 46-47: “Why, after all, call the birds ‘pink flamingos’—as if they could be blue or green?”) Or the rather ridiculous final line of the excerpt. All of the humor goes to soften the social criticism, and makes the piece more of a playfully mocking bit of observation.
- The kind of fake anthropological tone she takes on, which has on the surface this rather silly examination of the rise of the plastic pink flamingo, but underneath traces with slightly more seriousness the simultaneous rise of consumerism/materialism in the US.
Good Sample Thesis: Jennifer Price’s playful puns and whimsical tone soften her underlying criticism of 1950smaterialism in this excerpt from “The Plastic Pink Flamingo: a Natural History.”