Taylor Scuorzo d Rhetorical Analysis 3/20/23 Rhetorical Analysis Doing benevolent and selfless things for others can occasionally lead to adverse results. In his enlightening and illuminating commencement address given at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 19, 2018, Jason Reynolds emotionally persuades and informs the graduates at the college through the use of anecdotes and metaphors to show that ignoring the significant problems of the world will not help us fix them. To strengthen his speech, Reynolds uses past personal experiences and the comparison of objects to others to help prove the theme portrayed throughout the speech.
Richard Louv, a novelist, in Last Child in the Woods (2008) illustrates the separation between humans and nature. His purpose to the general audience involves exposing how the separation of man from nature is consequential. Louv adopts a sentimental tone throughout the rhetorical piece to elaborate on the growing separation in modern times. Louv utilizes pathos, ethos and logos to argue that the separation between man and nature is detrimental.
Rhetorical appeals reveal the hidden message the character is trying to convey. The rhetoric also highlights the character’s emotions, feelings and the significance of the text. It allows readers to gain a better understanding of the characters. Arthur Miler, the author of The Crucible, highlights the importance of mass hysteria through rhetorical appeals. John Proctor, the tragic hero is a loyal, honest, and kind-hearted individual.
After reviewing Leslie Steiner ted talk: ‘Crazy Love’, I found it to be an eye opener as well as a life long lesson. As I was evaluating her speech, I thought she did a good job overall, although some areas could have used some minor adjustments and/or improvements. Starting with her Topic selection; I thought it was a great topic considered it appealed to the audience who looked like they were between the ages of 20-45, just around the age she had mentioned for domestic violence victims. I thought her introduction were missing a few elements that could have made it that much better. I felt her introduction could have been more confident and including an audience adaptation could have made her introduction that much stronger.
In this passage, Ezekiel Cheever responds to John Proctor’s curiosity about what a needle in a poppet signifies and why his wife Elizabeth is being accused of using witchcraft against Abigail Williams. Cheever’s response explains his knowledge of how Abigail was afflicted, his possession of strong evidence against Elizabeth Proctor as a court official, and both his and the town of Salem’s tendency to turn to superstition to explain mysterious events. As Cheever explains how Abigail was afflicted by the needles from the poppet, he utilizes a simile when he states that Abigail fell to the floor, after being stabbed, “like a struck beast” (74). Cheever says this to emphasize the abruptness and intensity of the situation and how significant it is that there is no visual perception of anyone
A twelve year old boy a world away from his parents once wrote in a letter to his parents: “And I have nothing to comfort me, nor is there nothing to be gotten here but sickness and death.” This child was Richard Frethorne, and in “Letter to Father and Mother,” he communicates his desperation caused by the new world’s merciless environment to his parents to persuade them to send food and pay off his accumulated debts from the journey. He accomplishes this with deliberate word choice and allusions to the bible to appeal to ethos, pathos, and logos. Frethorne uses diction, imagery, and facts to create a letter to his parents which aims to garner sympathy for his state of life and to persuade them to send food and pay off his debts.
Throughout the novel Tuesday’s With Morrie, the author, Mitch Albom, reflects on his Tuesday meetings with his old professor, now consumed with a terminal illness, and, using many rhetorical choices, reveals “The Meaning of Life,” which they discussed profusely and divided into several categories. Topics such as Death, Emotions, Aging, Money, Culture, and more are all discussed in their weekly conferences, Morrie passing his wisdom on to one of his favor students. And Albom, writing about their talks, uses numerous rhetoric devices to discuss this wisdom. As Morrie Schwartz, dying of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), speaks with Albom, the two talk about Death.
The South was disallowed from seceding, which angered them a great amount. Taking their anger out on their former slaves, they continued to treat them horrifically. The black community felt defeated. Sometimes driven by racism to turning on each other, tensions existed between African-Americans as well. With a goal of explaining these tensions and educating readers on the difficult issues that slavery created, Toni Morrison wrote Beloved.
Requiem for the American Dream Rhetorical Analysis Throughout the documentary Requiem for the American Dream, the filmmakers Peter D. Hutchison, Kelly Nyks, and Jared P. Scott channel their proposition through Noam Chomsky, a former MIT professor of linguistics. The documentary was created in 2015, following a time of economic reformation in the U.S. Ultimately, this created the perfect opportunity to address U.S. citizens regarding this topic. The filmmakers were trying to persuade the general public by illustrating how the economy they are a part of has changed for the worse. They conduct this idea through Chomsky by having him state who the economy benefits and who it does not, along with how the corporations of today are taking over the
In this passage, Charlotte Perkins Gilman highlights the theme that women must use their intellect or go mad through the use of literary qualities and writing styles. Gilman also uses the use of capital letters to portray the decline in the narrators’ sanity. This shows the decline in the sanity of a person because the words in all-caps is shown as abrupt, loud remarks. Gilman uses this method multiple times in her short story and this method was used twice in this passage. When the narrator wrote, “LOOKING AT THE PAPER!”, the major decline in her mental health was shown.
For many African Americans in the 1800s, slavery was the darkest and most depressing period in their lives. Former slaves endured brutal beatings and mental agony and although it was abolished over a century ago, slavery left its victims in an abyss of distress. Regardless of its sensitivity, some survivors have been able to retell the traumatic events they underwent as a slave through writing. The authors of these autobiographies and narratives utilize pathos to elicit understanding and sympathy from readers as they vividly describe an appalling yet true era in American history.
In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the author often utilizes many different writing techniques to emphasize the story’s main idea that one cannot let past mistakes dictate one’s life and future. Morrison’s application of nonlinear exposition in Beloved helps convey the novel’s main theme by allowing the reader to witness Sethe’s journey to self-acceptance through her personal flashbacks and Paul D.’s point of view. From the beginning, the author incorporates a flashback to illustrate how Sethe is burdened with guilt from killing her baby daughter. Morrison makes it clear to the reader that Beloved is constantly on Sethe’s mind.
In life difficulties may arise, but an “instructive eye” of a “tender parent” is a push needed in everyone’s life. Abigail Adams believed, when she wrote a letter to her son, that difficulties are needed to succeed. She offers a motherly hand to her son to not repent his voyage to France and continue down the path he is going. She uses forms of rhetoric like pathos, metaphors, and allusions to give her son a much needed push in his quest to success.
John Milton’s Paradise Lost describes Hell as social, bearable, and escapable. First, Milton makes Hell social. In Book II, all of Heaven’s fallen angels hold a meeting. The audience is so big, Milton compares their cheering to “the sound of blust’ring winds, which all night long Had rous’d the sea” (II.286-7). This social “Hell” expressly opposes Biblical truth.
Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420). For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue.
