Anaphoras Smith's Speech Rhetorical Analysis

Often in Smith’s speech she manifests simple anaphoras on the sentence level to portray her personal opinion. The three different anaphoras Smith establishes to shed light on her dispositions, are “I think that it is high time,”, “I am not proud,” and “I condemn”. Each of these sets Smith up to display her discontent with the Senate and how she hopes for a more dignified regime in the future. Smith’s anaphora in the beginning of her speech, “I think that it is high time,” implements exaggeration of her vexation towards the issues within the Senate that have been present for far too long. When she places the “high” in front of “time” it forms a new meaning to her repetition. The “high” increases exaggeration, bearing that it is far past when

In the beginning of her speech Smith declares, “I speak as a Republican, I speak as a women. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.” This anaphora represents all of the different perspectives Smith holds, appealing to many audiences and giving her a more broad analysis of the situation. Her choices of syntax in this are also important because she places a comma between the first two because she is apart of the Republican party and being a women puts Smith in the minority in which these two ideas together gain he a higher sense of respect then they would apart. While the other two clauses are separated by periods because Smith being a Senator gives her credibility in the eyes of her colleagues and being an American puts her on the level of the citizens she is vouching for. On the other hand toward the end of her speech she repeats the word “As”. “As ” is then preceded by the same attributes she established earlier such as, being a republican, women, senator, and American. These two anaphoras however do not stand alone- they are in parallelism to one another. Smith connects “As members of the Minority Party” and “I speak as a Republican,”, “As a woman” and “I speak as a woman,” and so forth; every attribute she established in the beginning of her speech she then paralleled in her closing paragraphs. The objective of writing the first anaphora was so Smith could first establish her credentials for her audience’s reference, and then to be able to foreshadow the end of her speech. The foreshadow takes place in the beginning anaphora where she asserts that she “speaks as” her different traits giving a hint towards the parallelism to come. In Smith’s ending she mirrors her beginning by veritably speaking from these roles she lives in, going more in depth of what living in these roles looks like and the different perspectives