Elected Official, Harvey Milk in his speech “Analyzing Texts: Harvey Milk recalls events prior to his speech as a way to get people to want to be or do better.” Milk’s purpose is to persuade a mass rally to celebrate California Gay Freedom Day to get more involved and promote change. He adopts a severe and humorous tone to appeal to his audience's emotions and persuade them to be more involved. Milk starts his speech by incorporating his counterargument in the form of a joke. By mentioning his counterargument in the beginning milk appeals to the audience's sense of excitement by applying that he is giving the speech to recruit them to be gay. Later on in this speech Milk, on top of appealing to his audience's sense of excitement, appeals to his credibility by giving a specific example of what it was like for him to come out. In this discourse, Harvey states “ I will never forget what it was like coming out and having nobody to look toward. I remember the lack of hope.” Given …show more content…
He makes a joke, compares other ethnic groups being treated unfairly to gay people, uses personal examples, and he discusses stereotypes. For instance in the speech Milk brings up how many people believe “all Black, Asian, and Latin people are criminals, every Italian person is in the mafia, and gay people are child molesters.”This outlines how he uses various tips in his speech to get people to listen. Over the course of his speech, Harvey Milk furthermore uses negative denotation to help his audience visualize what he wants them to acknowledge. Milk says,” After Dade County, I walked among the angry and the frustrated night after night and I looked at their faces.”Milk uses these strategies as a way to help his audience imagine what it's like to be gay, Black, Asian, or even different during this time as a way to get them to elect people like them into office since no one can represent them like people like