Jk Rowling The Fringe Benefits Of Failure Rhetorical Analysis

The Rhetorical Analysis of the commencement speech at Harvard Famous fantasy author J. K Rowling, the “mother” of Harry Potters, addresses the commencement speech at Harvard in eighth June, 2008, which is titled “The Fringe Benefits of Failure” She genuinely talks about her personal experience to helpfully instruct the graduates. As the audiences have high achievements in academic study, but unfamiliar with normal failures, Rowling shares her valuable experiences on her heartbroken failures. The purpose is to share her mature views with the upcoming graduates to prepare for future unavoidable failures which everyone will face. Rowling’s colorful speech flexibly adopts abundant rhetorical devices, such as persuasive pathos, strong ethos,

It is the failures that lead her to focus on writing, without thinking one moment of other possibilities. She says, “failures meant a stripping away of the inessential.” It is logic that the series of failures swept away all the “inessential” things, so she succeed later. In other words, she uses logos to explain how she success, so the benefits of failures become more convincing. Furthermore, the expression “stripping away” visually describe the quick firm posture because she makes up her mind to do it. Plus, there is another sentence “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” She uses the device metaphor, which is an imaginative way to describe something by referring to another similar thing to be visual. As she mentions, “rock bottom” is setbacks and “solid foundation” is the benefits of it that turns out to be later. In other words, her failures lead her to success in her life. Furthermore, the setbacks turns out to be her firm supports rather than withdraw in her

Anticlimax means sudden shift which surprises the audiences like irony, and evoke waves of laughter. For instance, she seems fear of giving speech and the preparation costs her a lot of efforts. “Thank you. Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight.” When audiences are listening, they expect some valuable things from Rowling’s memory of her graduation, indicating by her previous saying, what Rowling will say is full of surprise for the audiences because they go out of convention, so audiences laugh out loudly. Plus, she was afraid of dragging those successful people would be into dreamers as crazy as her, “becoming a gay wizard”. However, her fears last until her “liberating discovery” come out “that I can’t remember a single word” of what the speaker addressed in her graduation 21 years ago, even though it is a famous person, Baroness Mary Warnock whose name she can remember well.. The audiences would expect some valuable marks from her memory of graduation, but what she finds is nothing, which is an abrupt turn. Plus, she uses this device to explain visually that she violate her parents’ expectations to study the major she likes in the college. “I cannot remember telling my parents that I was