The Top 25 Rhetorical Essay Topics For College Students

A rhetorical essay is designed to analyze the interaction between a piece of work and the audience. This type of essay can be applied to an advertisement, a poem, a photo, a website, an essay, a speech, and any other form of expression written or visual. It is designed to take a look at how the artist portrayed their work and not just the work itself. Here is a list of the top 25 rhetorical essay topics for college students.

1. Rhetorical Analysis of James Joyce’s Ulysses
2. Rhetorical Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
3. Rhetorical Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
4. Rhetorical Analysis of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
5. Rhetorical Analysis of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
6. Bosch’s “The Garden of Delights” painting from 1504
7. Michelangelo’s “Universal Judgment” of 1541 in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy
8. Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” in 1931
9. Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” from 1497
10. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” from 1889
11. Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman”
12. Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends”
13. Pablo Neruda’s “If You Forget Me”
14. E.E. Cummings’ “I Carry Your Heart with Me”
15. Emily Dickinson’s “There is Another Sky”
16. Lorde’s “Royals”
17. One Direction’s “ Story of My Life”
18. Katy Perry’s “Roar”
19. Ylvis’ “The Fox”
20. Pitbull’s “Timber”
21. Martin Luther King, Jr’s “I Have a Dream”
22. John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s Inaugural Address
23. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor Address to the Nation
24. Malcom X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet”
25. Ronald Wilson Reagan’s Challenger Shuttle Disaster Address

These should get you thinking about the topics that you could write this paper on. You can see that there are so many famous pieces of work to consider. When you are writing this type of essay be sure to express your opinions without sounding opinionated. You should support the claims with solid evidence and examples to back it up.

Remember that this type of essay looks more at the context over the content. It looks at how the author portrays certain aspects than what is portrayed. It is an analysis of the work as a whole and how it is perceived over what happens. These are important to remember because a lot of people get too involved in what is being said over how it is being said.