Rhetorical Analysis Of A Speech By Dr. Rosanna Reyes

On Thursday, February 16, 2017, Dr. Rosanna Reyes delivered a speech entitled “From Theory to Practice: Engaging First Generation College Students.” The speech was interesting to me, but perhaps this was because I related to the topic. Because of the layout of the speech and the way it was delivered, I sincerely believe that anyone who was not a first generation college student may have fallen asleep during this speech. I also do not think that she accomplished the goal of her speech: to persuade her audience to take action to engage first generation college students at a liberal arts college. Her introduction really was not even an introduction at all; in fact, it was nothing more than a biography on her part. This was effective with grabbing the audience’s attention because she told the story of her background and kept it interesting. I could

Reyes speech was a little clearer than her introduction, but not much. Her entire speech was based on personal narratives from Jefferson, the college she works a dean for; the reason I mention this is because the stories made it easy for her to explain what she was talking about while still keeping the audience’s attention, but this also made us confused. Dr. Reyes kept mentioning places at Jefferson as though we knew exactly what she was talking about, even though her audience members had never stepped foot on that campus (most of the audience were members of Allegheny College). Because of this, her points were not made very clear. She could have fixed this by explaining more of where she was talking about. Another problem with the speech was that Dr. Reyes kept saying phrase like, “I’ll explain this later,” or “We’ll come back to this.” Phrases like these made it hard to see where the speech was going and left me confused. Clearly, I was not the only person she lost the attention of though because I had noticed one person playing on their phone and another person sleeping during the middle of the