Best Character Analysis Essay Examples & Writing Samples

In November 1863, Abraham Lincoln spoke for about two minutes at the dedication of a cemetery for Union soldiers killed at Gettysburg. The crowd had already sat through a two-hour address by Edward Everett, and no one expected the president’s brief remarks to be remembered. Yet the Gettysburg Address has outlasted the speech that preceded it. Lincoln achieves this by refusing to describe the battle at all. Through an opening that reaches back to the founding of the country, a structure that moves from past to present to future, and a closing that hands responsibility to the living, Lincoln turns a burial ceremony into an argument for continuing the war.

Lincoln’s first sentence dates the nation to 1776 rather than to the Constitution, and it counts the years in the biblical idiom of “four score and seven.” The phrasing places the Declaration of Independence, with its claim that all men are created equal, at the origin of the country. For an audience that included both committed abolitionists and reluctant Unionists, this quiet substitution makes equality the founding promise rather than a wartime innovation. Lincoln never argues the point. He assumes it, and the assumption does the work an argument would have to fight for.

The speech then moves through three time frames in a single page. The past supplies the founding claim, the present supplies the dedication the crowd came for, and the future supplies the obligation. Lincoln marks the turn with a denial, telling the living they cannot dedicate ground the dead have already consecrated. Because the soldiers have finished that work, the only task left belongs to the audience. The sequence is tight enough that the conclusion feels forced by the premises rather than urged by the speaker.

The final sentence assigns the audience a job rather than offering them comfort. Lincoln asks the living to take increased devotion from the dead, and he closes by defining the Union cause as government of the people, by the people, for the people. The tripled phrase is easy to remember and hard to argue with, and it states the war aim in terms no listener could publicly reject. The speech redirects grief into commitment, which is exactly what a president fighting an unpopular war needed from a grieving crowd.

The Gettysburg Address succeeds because Lincoln matched every choice to one difficult occasion. A crowd that came to mourn left with a reason to continue, and the argument arrived so compressed that it gave opponents nothing to answer. Two minutes did more for the Union cause than the two hours that preceded them, which is the plainest measure of the speech’s effect.

The American car market of 1959 rewarded size. Detroit sold length, chrome, and tail fins, and its advertising matched the product with crowded pages and superlatives. Volkswagen’s “Think Small” advertisement did the opposite, and it did so deliberately. By leaving most of the page empty, writing copy that admits the car’s limits, and addressing the reader as a rational adult, the advertisement turns a disadvantage into evidence of honesty.

The layout carries the first argument. A small photograph of the Beetle sits in a wide field of white, so the eye registers the car’s size before reading a single word. Competing advertisements filled every inch of the page, and this one refuses to. The empty space is not decoration but a claim about the product, and it makes the headline almost redundant by the time the reader reaches it.

The copy then builds credibility by giving ground. Instead of listing features, the text admits what the car will not do and what it does not look like. A reader trained on advertising superlatives lowers their guard when an advertiser volunteers a weakness, and that concession makes the remaining claims about mileage and repair costs easier to accept. This is ethos built by understatement rather than by assertion.

Tone completes the appeal. The writing is dry, plain, and slightly amused at itself, which suits readers who consider themselves too sensible for tail fins. The advertisement never tells them they are sensible. It speaks in a register that only such a reader would enjoy, and it lets them supply the compliment themselves.

“Think Small” succeeds because its three choices agree with each other. Layout, copy, and tone all say the same thing about the product and about the buyer, and none of them raises its voice. The advertisement asks for a modest decision from a self-selecting audience, and every element it uses is calibrated to that request.

Halfway through Frankenstein, Mary Shelley gives her most persuasive speech to the character with the least standing to make one. The creature meets Victor on the ice above Chamonix and asks him to build a companion. He has already murdered a child, and Victor has climbed the mountain intending to kill him. That the request nearly succeeds is a result of how the creature argues, not of what he asks for.

He begins by naming the relationship rather than the crime. Calling Victor his creator, and himself the creature, forces Victor into a role that carries obligations, and Shelley has him press that role before any defense of his own conduct. The vocabulary of making and duty does work that an apology could not.

The middle of the speech borrows its authority from Paradise Lost. The creature compares himself to Adam, then corrects the comparison and names himself the fallen angel instead. The revision matters more than the allusion. By taking the darker parallel on himself, he removes the harshest available reading of his character from Victor’s hands, and from the reader’s.

Narrative structure supplies the strongest appeal to emotion. Shelley frames the creature’s account inside Victor’s, so the reader receives the story of abandonment and rejection in the creature’s own voice, at length, with no interruption from the man who left him. The formal choice grants the creature the one thing Victor never granted him, which is a hearing.

Shelley’s design makes the essay’s judgment an uncomfortable one, and that discomfort is deliberate. The speech persuades a reader who knows the speaker is a murderer, which is a harder task than the novel’s official protagonist ever attempts. Frankenstein earns its argument about responsibility not by stating it but by building a scene in which the reader sides with a character they came prepared to condemn.

The editorial argues for locking student phones away during the school day, and it is written for parents rather than for students or teachers. That choice of audience explains almost every decision in the piece. Through a first-person opening, selective use of research, and a closing that presents the policy as protection, the editorial persuades effectively while leaving its weakest reasoning unexamined.

The opening paragraph describes the writer’s own daughter checking her phone at the dinner table. The scene is specific, brief, and familiar, and it establishes that the writer is a parent before it establishes that the writer has an argument. Readers who recognize the scene are ready to agree with the conclusion before any evidence arrives.

The middle section moves to logos and handles it unevenly. The writer cites research linking heavy phone use to lower test scores, then treats that correlation as though it settled causation. The editorial also reports that one nearby district saw grades rise after a ban, without mentioning what else changed at that school in the same year. A reader who accepts both moves has been persuaded by data that cannot carry the weight placed on it.

The closing paragraph returns to emotion and raises the stakes. Phones become something taken from children rather than something handed to them, and opponents of the policy appear as people defending distraction. This is the weakest move in the piece, because it dismisses the strongest objection, which concerns reaching a child in an emergency, as though no one had raised it.

The editorial does its job on its intended readers, and a rhetorical analysis can name the reasons. Its emotional framing is precise, its evidence is thin, and the two are arranged so that most readers will not notice which is doing the persuading.

Road safety campaigns usually rely on damage. Crash footage, injuries, and casualty figures are the standard tools, and audiences have learned to look away from them. “Embrace Life” takes the opposite approach and never shows a crash at all. By removing the vehicle, slowing the action, and casting the driver’s family as the seat belt itself, the film argues for a safety measure without asking anyone to watch a collision.

The absence of a car is the central choice. A man sits in a plain chair in an empty studio and drives without one, and the crash arrives as movement rather than as impact. Nothing on screen is graphic, so viewers who normally protect themselves from this kind of campaign keep watching. The argument reaches an audience that the conventional version loses in the first three seconds.

Slow motion then converts the moment into something readable. A real crash lasts less than a second and cannot be understood while it happens. Stretched across many seconds, the same event becomes a sequence the viewer can follow, and the seat belt’s function is visible instead of merely asserted.

The strongest appeal is the substitution at the center of the film. The wife and daughter reach out and hold the man in place, so the belt is played by the people it protects him for. The film never states that idea in words. A viewer who has understood the image has already accepted the argument, which is a more durable result than a statistic produces.

“Embrace Life” succeeds by identifying what its audience had stopped responding to and then removing it. The film gives up shock, evidence, and narration, and it keeps one image that carries all three of those functions at once.