Public Speaking essay: rhetorical analysis
The purpose of a rhetorical analysis is to evaluate a speaker’s strategies and determine if the speaker was effective in accomplishing his/her goal. For this assignment, you will pick a historical speech and (1) do a little research to understand the speaker’s rhetorical situation (what was happening that led to the speech? What problem did the speaker need to solve? What did the speaker need to accomplish with this speech?) and (2) analyze the speaker’s strategies to see if they are effective as a response to the situation/problem the speaker is facing.
By “strategies,” what’s meant is any thing the speaker does to persuade the audience or get them to adopt his/her point-of-view. This could include the speaker’s arguments, use of narrative, compelling word choice, evidence, appeals to emotions, appeals to shared values, organization, etc. Think of all the concepts and all the approaches we’ve talked about in this class, from delivery to finding the right angle for your speech: in your analysis, you may find any of these to be key strategies of the speaker. While the prime directive for this assignment is to ask whether the speech was effective, you are also welcome to comment on the ethics of the speech: in other words, does the speaker take liberties with truth or evidence to make his/her point? Does the speaker use stereotypical or loaded or hateful language? Does the speaker manipulate the audience?
A sample organization for this kind of essay could be as follows:
Paragraph 1: “attention getter” and thesis (e.g., Obama’s “race speech” uses many kinds of narratives to show that racism still shapes how we view the world).
Paragraph 2: background/context . . . explain the situation, the problem the speaker was facing, or what the speaker needed to accomplish (e.g., Kennedy needed to show that, even though he was a Catholic, he was an independent thinker). [note: this is something you’ll need to do some research on]
Paragraph 3: describe the speech — discuss the event, summarize the speech and the main arguments, discuss the audience. [research may help here too]
Paragraph 4-6: Describe the key strategies the speaker employed. You don’t have to talk about everything in the speech; just pick out the strategies you think are most significant to whether or not the speech is successful. [you can get by without research; this is more like the creative part of the paper where you invent the analysis — this is where you apply the magic of “naming” to tell us what the strategies are. ]
Paragraph Last: Evaluate. Put it all together. Show how the strategies help (or not) the speaker to solve the problem described in Paragraph 2 (or accomplished the goal).
ScholarMatic: Explanation & Answer
Your ready answer from a verified tutor is just a click away for as little as $14.99
Click Order Now to get 100% Original Answer Customized to your instructions!
