Reflective Speech Analysis

Reflective Speech Draft

Speeches have been used for thousands of years to communicate ideas and influence others. Ralph Waldo Emerson; American poet, essayist and lecturer, once said, "Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense." He was correct, speech is indeed a powerful tool which has the ability to influence and persuade an audience; if an audience is positioned carefully and the speech is written in such a way that the audience 's emotions, logic and trust in the speaker are all appealed to. This is rhetoric. Rhetoric must be used in order for a speech to effectively convey information in such a way that an audience member is persuaded and influenced by the author’s ideas.

Shane Maloney criticises the values and actions of Scotch College, calling the current students to be different from their predecessors. David Morrison criticises the extremely inappropriate actions of several members of the Australian Army, reinforces the importance of females in the army, and calls members to take a stand against exploitation and degradation of fellow soldiers. In both speeches, several rhetoric devices are used to increase the effectiveness of communication and influence the audience, and rhetoric modes are utilised to make concepts more memorable and engage the listeners.

Pathos is used in speeches to appeal to the emotions of the audience, and convince them by evoking an emotional response. In his speech at Scotch College, Shane Maloney says “Well, all this is hardly the fault of the current crop of students.” He then goes on to say "It is not your fault…" two more times in the following sentences. This passage is relying heavily on the use of pathos, in addition to groups of three and personal pronouns. By positioning the audience to feel that they are victims, and by emphasising that it is not their fault, but that they have been placed in an undesirable