Kathleen Rowling's Speech Persuasive Essay

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Joanne Kathleen Rowling is a world-known British author, and she is best known for her ”Harry Potter” series. Rowling is also one of the wealthiest women. In Harry Potter, she expresses the goodness in people, and her imagination gives Harry Potter the possibility of achieving something, even though his life is tough. That is also what Rowling wants the graduates to know, in her speech ““The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination”, at Harvard University in 2008. In Rowling’s commencement speech, she mentions that instead of going down the financial success path, the students from Harvard should choose to go down of their personal success and follow what they are truly passionate about. She did this by herself and succeeded, but it started out with poverty and failure. Though she …show more content…

This is a quote that Rowling mentions in her speech. She uses the audiences’ emotions and imaginations to make them feel for the ones who are in pain and are suffering. The purpose of the pathos here is to persuade the audience to say that the graduates have to speak for the people who cannot speak for themselves. Rowling’s speech is persuasive. She uses a lot of her own personal views and opinions, such as the benefits of failure and the crucial importance of imagination. These views and opinions show the audience how they need to act in the real world. The speech is also an entertaining speech, because of the humour used, and because of the dramatized anecdote about her life and how she got through a hard time (L51-55). By using this strategy of the anecdote, she has been able to completely seduce and hook her listeners. Rowling’s speech is very formal, for an example: “I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination”. She uses this kind of language because it is appropriate to talk formally in front of the Ivy League (top elite) in

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