One of the most powerful recurring assignments in my AP Language class is the rhetorical precis: a four-sentence analysis of a current news article that students write every week through the first semester. It’s compact, but it does a lot of work: it gets students reading real news, it walks them through a full rhetorical situation analysis (speaker, purpose, audience, context, and exigence), and it starts them thinking about the rhetorical choices writers make. It’s also refreshingly easy to grade, since the format is so formulaic, and that’s intentional. Once students can do this cold on a new text every week, they can write the thesis or introduction to almost any rhetorical analysis essay I give them.
Students pick an article from an approved list of news sources, ideally published that week. I don’t restrict topics; I want them choosing something that actually interests them. NPR is always my fallback recommendation: its articles are varied in style and content, and there’s often an audio version students end up listening to while they read.
The format itself is four sentences. The first sentence names the author, the genre and title of the piece, the date, a rhetorically accurate verb (asserts, argues, suggests, implies, claims), and a that-clause containing the author’s major assertion. Here’s a real student example: “In her New York Times article, ‘A Forgotten Step in Saving African Wildlife: Protecting the Rangers,’ from November 28th, 2016, Rachel Nuwer claims that many park personnel are going without necessities such as health insurance, and that necessary measures aren’t being taken to help solve this issue.”
The second sentence explains how the author develops or supports that thesis, usually in chronological order, naming specific rhetorical choices. From the same student: “She supports this claim by offering the reader statistical evidence and by explaining numerous touching stories to impact the audience emotionally and gain some sort of sympathy.”
The third sentence restates the author’s purpose, using an “in order to” phrase. Purpose gets its own sentence because it’s central enough to any rhetorical analysis piece to deserve one. The fourth and final sentence is a choice: students can analyze the intended audience if it seems especially specific, or simply explain why they chose that article. I like leaving that choice open; it’s interesting to see what students are drawn to.
I’m strict about the format: the precis has to be typed, with a link to the article at the top, in that exact four-sentence structure, due once a week (mine are due on Thursdays through Google Classroom). The first few weeks are rough for a lot of students, so I pull strong individual sentences, even from otherwise messy submissions, to go over as a class the next day, and I usually give students one mulligan to fix their first attempt. After that, the expectations hold. It’s a small weekly habit that pays off enormously once students move into full rhetorical analysis essays.