Dear Readers,

Here's a rhetorical analysis paper I wrote for school a while back. I like the essay. The second to last paragraph is funny, I think.

Rhetorical Analysis of “Nothing But Nets” by Rick Reilly

Recently I was reading through the McGraw Hill Guide and came across “Nothing But Nets” by Rick Reilly, an article that first appeared in Sports Illustrated in 2006. I was just browsing through the textbook, looking for a text I could rhetorically analyze for this assignment. I started reading some of the texts on the pages with purple borders, but, for some reason or another, I quickly stopped reading them, and flipped the pages again, looking for something else. Then I flipped to “Nothing But Nets,” read the first few paragraphs, and then the next few paragraphs, and then kept reading until the article was over. Maybe it was the clever writing, or maybe it was the interesting subject matter. Whatever it was, by the end of the article, I was seriously considering donating money for nets in Africa, like the author, Rick Reilly wanted me to.

Then I remembered why I read the article in the first place. I was not an ordinary Sports Illustrated reader. I wasn’t even really a sports fan. Really, I was a college student given the assignment of rhetorically analyzing the article. So what rhetoric was in there? How did the author use rhetorical appeals? It is my purpose in this essay to identify the rhetorical appeals used in “Nothing But Net” and show how they were used. Also, the effects of the audience on this text will also be discussed.

After carefully reading through the article again, I spotted Reilly using ethos several times. In the third paragraph, Reilly says, “And according to the World Health Organization” (Reilly 434). This is use of ethos. Rick Reilly knows that he himself is not a reliable source on the number of malaria-related deaths in Africa, but the World Health Organization is.

In another part of the essay, Reilly uses ethos by citing another important organization. He writes, “’Every cent will go to nets,’ says Andrea Gay, the U.N. Foundation’s Director of Children’s Health” (435). I didn’t even know there was such a position as the “U.N. Foundation’s Director of Children’s Health” but that title doesn’t sound made-up, and it sounds really important. And that’s what ethos is all about: sounding authentic, reliable and important.

Another place I spotted ethos was when Reilly tells his audience about a website where they can donate money. Reilly writes, “Please go to a special site we’ve set up” (435). Wait a minute. Why does Reilly use the pronoun “we”? Clearly he is only one person writing the article. Does Reilly have some kind of an ego problem or a multiple personality problem? No, I think he uses “we” to give himself more authority. It makes him sound like more than one person. If the reader thought that Rick Reilly was the only person who was in charge of donating nets to Africa, then the reader would not be as convinced that the charity operation is genuine. But, if the reader believes that numerous people are involved in this charity project, then he or she will be more likely to do what the author wants them to do: donate money to Africa for mosquito nets.

Reilly also uses plenty of logical appeals in his article. One very prevalent way in which Reilly uses logos is by citing statistics. He throws around numbers such as the amount of money it would take to buy a net, the amount of money he has personally donated, and the amount of money that Bill Gates and Ted Turner have donated, (which name-dropping, by the way, is a little bit of ethos).

Reilly makes another logical appeal when he mentions that the nets are coated with insecticide. Telling the audience about the insecticide coating gets the reader thinking along these lines, “Oh, insecticide kills the mosquitoes, so the malaria-infected mosquitoes can never bite people, so people don’t get malaria, so African kids keep living.” That’s all very logical and sense making.

Reilly also heavily relies on pathos in his article. First of all, the topic of the article alone- children dying from malaria in Africa, is an emotional one. And Reilly doesn’t avoid the emotionality of the subject, either. He goes after the reader’s heart. One place in which pathos is most obvious is in the third and fourth paragraph. Reilly says, “See, nearly 3,000 kids die every day in Africa from Malaria…That’s a 9/11 every day!” (434). 9/11, as you well know, was a horrific event that left a scar in the collective American psyche. Just saying the term “9/11” calls up images of planes hitting the Twin Towers, people in business suits running and screaming- it’s a very emotional thing.

Then at the end of the article, Reilly hits the reader with another emotionally charged anecdote of his visit to Tanzania. He tells the story of when he played soccer with some school kids there. But the kids didn’t have wonderful sporting equipment, to say the least. In fact, all they had was “a taped-up wad of newspaper” (436) for the ball and two rocks for the goal. After Reilly got back to America, he mailed them some soccer balls and nets. His last paragraph, filled with pathos, is “I kick myself now for that. How many of those kids are dead because we sent the wrong nets?” (436).

Reilly successfully uses all three rhetorical appeals in his article. But in addition to using these rhetorical appeals, Reilly is very aware of the context in which he is writing the article. That is, he knows who he is, who his audience is, what the purpose of his article is, and he writes accordingly. For the rest of this essay, I will examine how Reilly’s sense of audience affects the text. (How author and purpose affects the text can be left to your imagination.)

You can tell that Reilly is aware of his audience in several places. First off, the title of the article is a play on the familiar basketball phrase, “nothing but net.” This title is an example of using a familiar phrase most readers of Sports Illustrated would know. Would a title like that be found in an issue of the scholarly journal Shakespeare Quarterly? I doubt it.

In another place, Reilly tries to get readers to understand what’s happening with malaria in Africa by giving them an analogy. He says, “Let’s say your little Justin’s Kickin’ Kangaroos have a big youth soccer tournament on Saturday” (434). This is a perfect hypothetical situation to create for his audience. After all, many of the people reading the Sports Illustrated article are fathers; perhaps even fathers with children involved in soccer. Thus, the audience can relate to the scenario that Reilly is creating, thus it is more meaningful to the audience, and thus Reilly shows us once again that he is very aware of his audience.

Now, if “Nothing but Nets” was an article in a Star Wars fanzine, maybe the author would say something like, “To put things in perspective, imagine the planet Endor being blasted every day by the Death Star. Every day at noon, let’s say, storm-troopers in space revved up the ion canons and blasted the wooded home of the Ewoks, killing a fourth of them, forever silencing thousands of our furry friends. That’s basically what happens every day in Africa. Every single day. Except in the real world, kids aren’t dying from the neon-colored blasts of ion canons, they’re dying from malaria.” See how that works? The article changes as the audience changes. The author cites different references, creates different hypothetical situations, crafts different analogies, and uses different words, depending on who his audience is.

As a veteran writer, Reilly is adept at using the three rhetorical appeals. And he doesn’t just use one at a time; oftentimes in a single paragraph he uses all three, thus weaving together an effective tapestry of a persuasive article. Reilly is also very aware of his audience and writes accordingly. In fact, the rhetorical situation in which “Nothing But Nets” exists, the author, audience, and purpose, makes the text what it is. Come to think of it, that’s the way it is with all texts, everywhere; the particular author, audience, and purpose largely determine the makeup and characteristics of a text.

Work Cited

Reilly, Rick. “Nothing but Nets.” The Concise McGraw-Hill Guide: Writing for College,

Writing for Life. Gregory R. Glau, Barry M. Maid, and Duane Roen. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. 434-436.