Introduction For a linguistics class, I had to write an essay that either supported the notion that wealth brings far greater problems than depriving people of beauty or arguing that access to beauty is far more important than some might believe. The essay was titled, “The negative effects of wealth in society”. I decided to take the first argument and provided an analysis that illustrated the critical role that wealth plays in bringing about most societal vices. In this essay, I seek to analyze the rhetorical devices used in the piece of writing described above. To this end, I shall focus on a number of aspects including the purpose for writing the essay, the audience, the genre, the appeals, organization of the text, omitted information, evidence included and the style of the essay. Reasons for writing the essay The primary reason as to why I wrote this essay stemmed from the fact that I had a clear understanding of how wealth has led to the physical and structural destruction of the society in which we live. I have had experiences in the past with moneyed people coming to an uninhabited piece of land surrounded by wonderful geological features such as fresh water springs. Instead of leaving these marvels of nature the way they found them, these people clear the land and set up bottling plants for what is popularly known as ‘mineral water’. The downside of these kinds of investments is that with time the springs dry up and the emissions from such factories end up causing an unprecedented destruction to the atmosphere. Aside from this, I have also witnessed how wealthy people use their money and power to exploit the less endowed individuals. A person would set up a company that brings in millions of dollars in profits but instead of sharing it appropriately with his/her members of staff, he/she offers them salaries that cannot even comfortable take them through a basic month. I also needed to write on how wealth or the search for wealth had the effect of breaking up family ties. In this regard, I wanted to illustrate that in a bid to make as much wealth as possible individuals end up disregarding the importance of cultivating proper relationships with fellow family members, and this in turn has been the fundamental contributor to absenteeism as far as parental roles are concerned. Genre The genre of the essay above is contemporary. This is because the essay talks about an issue that affects society on a daily basis. The essay had not topical guidelines defining its direction and in a way had an immense freedom of range. As far as the content was concerned, it was designed to provide detailing for a specialized topic in linguistics which depended on basic exemplification from day-to-day living. The form of this essay, by the virtue of alternating between argumentative and descriptive also played a great role in establishing its definition as contemporary. The essay at some point categorically provided a statement that illustrated the negative effects of wealth in today’s society and then I went ahead to list examples from modern-day life to back up the statement. The essay also adopted the contemporary tag because it was elastic and could acc