Larry Smith Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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"Wasted talent is a waste I cannot stand." This is a quote from economist professor Larry Smith during an interview for the global media company Forbes. Larry Smith is an economist who works at the University of Waterloo in Canada. In the year 2011, he gave a very influential Ted talk to an audience of millions. In a brief 15 minutes, Larry Smith provides humor and blunt honesty in order to inform his audience as to why a person may fail to have a prosperous and successful career. Throughout his Ted talk, Smith adopts a humorous, but subjective tone to appeal to his audience while also using many real life examples. Smith begins his speech by describing how people have the mindset to pursue a great career, but tends to not follow the steps to do so. The credibility of his speech is well established by his subjective tone. Rather than using statistics, he uses his own opinions and real life situations in order to convey a sense of credibility behind his …show more content…

He establishes his credibility as a successful economist and uses subjective tone to set the stage for why the audience should believe his reasoning. Along with his credibility, he concentrates on real life situations in order to appeal emotionally with his audience. In doing so, he manages to gain a relationship and establishes authority by managing rhetorical distance between the audience and himself. He then focusses on logically appealing to the audience by displaying their weaknesses due to the fear of failing and looking ridiculous while trying. In addition, he exemplifies humor and a candor attitude to inform the world as to why they will not succeed in having a lucrative career. By the end of his speech, Smith was able appeal to the audience's sympathy and leave them with that everlasting and heartbreaking feeling of "what

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