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Rhetorical Analysis Of Clare Boothe Luce's Speech

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During a meeting of the 1960 Women’s National Press Club, journalists from across the United States offered a chance for a well-known journalist and politician by the name of Clare Boothe Luce to speak about the significance of journalistic integrity. During this speech, she criticized the tendency of the press to write false articles about catchy new stories to gain popularity and more money from people reading them; however, she also knew that her topic would be a rather controversial one to speak about, so she prepared well. In the opening of her speech, Luce utilizes a variety of rhetorical devices and strategies to not only persuade her audience to listen to her message and hear her out but take it in stride as well as improve upon themselves …show more content…

She casts herself as a “rock thrower” to her fellow journalists in order to demonstrate the immense positive possibility of her message but also the perils of delivering the aforementioned message. She chooses to analogize her situation with one of a rock-thrower in order to capture her audience’s emotions and lessen their potential anger at the criticisms she leads on to deliver during the body of her speech. Consequently, her analogy is also a light-hearted statement of self-deprecation, which persuades her audience to listen to her speech rather than simply treat it as mindless banter and ignore it. Luce goes on to mention the fact that the subject she would be discussing is of “great national significance”, in the hopes that her audience realizes just how necessary her criticisms would be later on and that they would take to heart some of the improvements they could undertake. She phrases her analogy in such a way as to convince her audience to devote their whole attention her speech despite their potential disdain for her critiques; however, she chose the best possible strategy for this purpose because the particular choice of diction in her analogy about being a rock-thrower effectively displayed to her audience that her position was one of positive influence yet great danger. Luce’s introductory paragraph sets up well-organized and persuasive preparation for her later

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