A Rhetorical Lemon Squeezer

One way to develop our own essay-writing skills is to examine carefully how professional writers achieve a range of different effects in their essays. Such a study is commonly called a "rhetorical analysis." However, Professor Richard Lanham (in his book Analyzing Prose) prefers to call it "a lemon squeezer": a modern term, he says, "for an old-fashioned exercise--exhaustive rhetorical description. Find every pattern you can in a given text."

To illustrate this kind of analysis, we've taken E.B. White's essay "The Ring of Time" (included in our Essay Sampler: Models of Good Writing, Part Four) and studied the patterns of his words and sentences, from the opening metonymy to the closing metaphor.

Admittedly, our Rhetorical Analysis of E B. White's "The Ring of Time" is not a light, easy read. You'll find a few dozen odd-looking terms used to describe the various figures of speech in White's essay, but bear with us: each of these old Greek and Latin words is linked to a definition in our Glossary of Grammatical & Rhetorical Terms. Before you know it, "epizeuxis" may stop sounding like a sneeze, and the clever device of "chiasmus" might start showing up in your own essays.

Whatever we choose to call it, close study of a text is not an end in itself. After you have read our Rhetorical Analysis of E B. White's "The Ring of Time", there are two things you might want to try:

1. Analyze (or squeeze) your own writing to see what kinds of sentence structures and figures of speech you're in the habit of using.
2. Consider borrowing one or two of E.B. White's strategies when you sit down to write your next essay.

But first, please read White's "Ring of Time," and then join us for a little lemon squeezing.