On May 10, 2014, here at Howard University, former and fellow Bison family member Sean Combs, delivered a very passionate speech about life here at Howard and how he used his drive and growing potential to further propel him into his career today. My analysis will focus primarily on how Combs used the art of storytelling, quotation, and redundancy to not only engage his audience’s interest, but to solely maintain their interests and evoke passion from them. He used a vast amount of techniques within his speech, however I chose to only focus on the major divisions of his speech. His introduction captured the audience’s attention, the body of his speech presented the audience with the content of his emotion towards commencement, and lastly his …show more content…
His delivery was loud enough to be heard, yet piercing enough to portray his excitement. His opening reference to his fond memories of “Howard’s Homecoming” was a direct attention grabber. (Pearson, pp. 176-177) His use of pauses for simple effect and the complexity of his sentences helped his audience to visualize the concept without ambiguity. (Pearson, p. 171) While giving his audience a great amount of descriptive details, he made sure not to over do it in order for them to still receive the message at hand. He appealed heavily to the audience’s excitement of Commencement. Combs had his fair share of gestures and direct eye-contact, which fortunately made the delivery of his speech better received. (Pearson, pp. …show more content…
During this part of the speech, he uses good verbal transitions, and analogies to appropriate his feelings of the power he felt after completing the marathon and even afterwards while returning home in Harlem where this very dream to attend Howard University first started. (Sean Combs,