A rhetorical analysis argues about how a text works, so its thesis has to make a contestable claim about the machinery. Build one part by part and watch a live rubric grade it — then switch to the audit and run the subject test on a draft paragraph to catch the drift from analysing a text to retelling it.
Five parts of a thesis
Training wheels, not a template to submit:Facing [exigence] and readers likely to [resist in some specific way], the writer [strategy] in order to [effect] — a move that [succeeds or strains] because [reason]. Once the moves are second nature, throw the scaffold away.
Whose sentence is it?
The subject test. Highlight the grammatical subject of every sentence in a draft. Subjects like nurse staffing or patients are about the world; subjects like the third paragraph, the concession, Alvarez are about the text. If much more than a third of your subjects are world-subjects, you have written an essay about staffing rather than about an essay about staffing. Tag each subject below.
Your thesis
Live rubric
Analysis or retelling?
—nothing tagged yet
The paragraph, revised
Four things change: the subject of nearly every sentence becomes the text or the writer, every claim about effect is tied to a specific piece of language, a structural choice gets named, and the paragraph ends on consequence rather than on “then she talks about.”