How to write the AP English Language rhetorical analysis essay

This passage was written for this course. It imagines an essay that a high school mathematics teacher publishes in a city magazine in 1974, during a gasoline shortage, about riding a bicycle to work.

I bought the bicycle in November, the week the lines at the gas station on Fuller Avenue began to stretch around the block. I did not buy it out of virtue. I bought it because I had spent forty minutes in that line on a Tuesday morning, reading the bumper sticker on the car ahead of me until I knew it by heart, and I arrived at school after the first bell to find my homeroom holding an election for class president without me. I was not, I learned, a candidate.

The bicycle is green, secondhand, and heavier than it looks. It has three speeds, of which I use two. The third, I have decided, is for people with something to prove.

I expected to save money, and I have, although less than I hoped; the savings on gasoline have gone, almost to the penny, into a raincoat, a set of lights, and a quantity of doughnuts that I do not intend to discuss. I expected to get exercise, and I have, although the four miles to school are mostly downhill and the four miles home are mostly not, so that I arrive at work cheerful and at home in a state that my wife describes as “thoughtful.” What I did not expect was to learn the city.

For eleven years I had driven the same route to school: Fuller to the parkway, the parkway to Grant Street, four lights, one left turn. I could have told you the time it took to the minute. I could not have told you what was on the corners. In a car, the city is something you pass through on the way to somewhere else, a corridor with billboards. On a bicycle it becomes a place. I have learned that there is a bakery on Ninth Street that opens at five and gives yesterday's rolls to anyone who asks. I have learned which dogs on Hollis Avenue are serious. I know the man who sweeps the steps of the Lutheran church every morning, not by name, but well enough that we nod, and on the one morning he was not there, I worried about him all through second period.

I do not want to make too much of this. A bicycle is not a philosophy, and there are mornings in February when it is not even a pleasure. I have been splashed by buses, honked at by taxis, and once, memorably, chased for half a block by a goose that had wandered up from the river and taken a dislike to me. Some of my colleagues, who live farther out, could not ride to school if they wanted to, and I would not suggest that they try. The shortage will end, and when it does, most of us will go back to our cars, and the lines will disappear, and I suspect I will drive on the coldest days myself.

But I will not go back entirely. I have spent eleven years teaching students that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and I still believe it. What I had not considered is that the shortest distance is not always the one you want. Some routes are worth taking because of what lies along them. I would not have learned that in a car, and I am not sure I would have learned it at all if a stranger's bumper sticker had not made me late.