Question 2: The Rhetorical Analysis Prompt

The prompt opens with a short note naming the speaker, the audience, and the year before you read a word of the passage. That is not throat-clearing. A rhetorical choice only counts as rhetorical because of who was speaking to whom, and when. A metaphor in a eulogy is doing different work than the same metaphor in a campaign speech. The prompt hands you the situation up front so you read the whole passage already asking what job each sentence is doing for that speaker, facing that audience, at that moment.

The fixed wording of the prompt always points back to one thing: the message, or the speaker's purpose. Every device you notice has to earn its place in your essay by connecting to that purpose. So instead of hunting for metaphor, anaphora, and rhetorical question as a checklist, hunt for three things: what claim or attitude the speaker wants the audience to leave with, which specific choices build that claim, and what effect each choice has on this particular audience's thinking or feeling. A device named without that third piece is just vocabulary.

This is why the occasion named in the prompt matters as much as the passage itself. A commencement speech is delivered to an audience sitting in a room, about to walk out of it forever. That fact changes what counts as a smart reading. Lines that sound like simple nostalgia are doing the work of marking an ending and launching what comes next, a pressure a published essay aimed at distant readers never has to answer. Question 2 sits beside the other two essays as the one built entirely around situation: who, to whom, why, right now.