Response to 'What Writing Does'

Overall, the rhetorical analyses caught me off guard. I have never been exposed to writing that grants so much effort and importance to a single magazine page, or instructional website. Moreover, this writing is exciting, and it's amazing to see objects that we ordinarily consume blindly go through such meaningful deconstruction(This would be true regardless of whether my professor wrote the article or not).
What was particularly enlightening to me occurred during the final analysis, of the instructional website. With the many definitions of rhetoric floating around in my mind, while reading this section a question came to me that seemed to sum up my understanding of rhetoric: "What is it doing?" This could be taken simply as the object's 'purpose', but to me this question begs an even further one: "How is it doing this?" Obviously rhetoric is much more complicated than how/why an object is acting on you, to begin proceeding rhetorically you first need to learn the how/why of identifying an object's how/why.