Rhetorical Analysis Of Speech By Florence Kelley

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The speech from 1905 given to the Philadelphia convention of the National American Women’s Suffrage association by Florence Kelley highlights the issue of child labor in poor working conditions that had to be changed. Kelley manipulates her sentences into a large variety of fluid syntax structures and displays a prolific use of shifting between quantitative evidence and short anecdotes along with sporadic yet organized placements of repetition; in using these devices, she persuades her audience to act on stopping these abhorrent roles placed onto young children. First, Kelley’s syntax structures are diverse and switch between conforming and nonconforming grammar in a relatively pleasant manner. In paragraph 2 from the sentence starting in line 10, she has constructed a long sentence with two independant clauses glued by a semicolon: first, a clause including a medium lengthed list stating examples of people in certain groups that “increase in the ranks of the breadwinners;” then, an emphasizing clause that begins with the conjunction “but.” Normally using conjunctions as so is considered grammatically incorrect. …show more content…

At the beginning of this piece, Kelley opens with statistics about “two million children under the age of sixteen” already working to make a living. This quantitative evidence is an appeal to both logos and ethos because they are factual statistics, and such a statement is written in order to make the audience acknowledge that this is wrong since, logically, children should be in school and not working long adult hours. The anecdote in the paragraph on line 46 describes a girl working “twelve hours at night” on her 13th birthday. A great appeal to pathos and logos is created due to how terrible it would be for anyone, let alone a 13 year old girl, to be working a grueling night shift on their