You don’t need a highbrow or sophisticated topic for a successful rhetorical analysis, as Professor Cohen’s look at Google, DVDs, and No Fear Shakespeare suggests. It’s a much better strategy to dissect a text that genuinely interests you and then make an audience as intrigued by it as you are. If you take something seriously (zombies, for example), chances are that your readers will too. So begin an open-ended assignment by listing the sorts of texts you work with regularly. Even text messages and tweets can be studied rhetorically if you approach them from a new angle.