The Rhetorical analysis of a speech.

How to Approach the Assignment
Excellent speeches have changed the world. How or why do prepared remarks affect listeners so deeply? For this assignment, you’ll choose a speech to analyze, evaluating its rhetorical strategies to judge how successful or unsuccessful the author is in achieving his or her purpose. By breaking the text down into its parts, you can see what lines of reasoning connect facts and opinions, as well as understand what assumptions underlie the argument as a whole. Being able to ascertain whether or not a text “does its job” is important for students, workers, and citizens.
First, choose a speech.

The speech should be from one of the two websites below.
Choose a topic, historical period, or writer you feel strongly about.
Or choose something you’re open minded about–the better to assess the speaker’s persuasive strategies.

The essay should be:

3-4 pages in length (which is 750 to 1,000 words)
12-point font in Times New Roman or Arial
In MLA manuscript format (double-spaced, etc. See Resource tab for more information)

All of the papers you write for this class should be entirely your own work. The penalty for taking part or all of your ideas or words from someone else’s work is a zero for the assignment — and possibly, depending on the seriousness of the plagiarism, an “F” for the course. Your academic honesty is necessary for this course to be fair, effective, and worthwhile.

1. Choose a speech from the required web sites.
American Rhetoric
This archive contains many speeches, including the top hundred American speeches. You may choose any speech from AmericanRhetoric.com, except for a Movie Speech (unless it is an historical recreation of an actual speech). Please provide a copy of the text with your final draft.

TED Talks

TED talks are 20 minutes or less discussions of an idea that an expert is passionate about. Often they are distillations of years of research to its essential ideas. They are less intentionally persuasive than many of the political speeches above, but many are arguments–attempts by the speaker to get the listener to care about or act on their “big” idea. Because this is a visual medium, analyze the spoken as well as non-verbal elements (including graphics, images, etc.). As above, you need to provide a copy of the transcript for your final draft. Because reading is often faster than listening, you may want to read the transcripts of a particular talk first. Just below the viewing window to the far right of the screen in drop down menu it says, “Show Transcript”–copy the text from there.

2. Prewriting
Complete the prewriting questions to get started. Directions are found in the file.
hetorical Analysis Prewriting Questions

3. Drafting
Considering your completed chart and your answers to the above questions, what ideas are present in multiple places? Sometimes one clear topic emerges sometimes related to delivery, logic, or other matters from your prewriting sheet.
Then outline possible body paragraph topics to support your best thesis. These topics may align closely to your most developed prewriting question areas.
Your introduction should begin with an introductory hook to add interest; next, it should introduce the speaker’s full name, prize-winning status/year or other pertinent information, and briefly describe the context of the speech (not necessarily in that order) and transition to your thesis.
Your conclusion should develop final reflections about topics raised in your paper.

4. Source Use
Many of the speeches will raise questions, depending on how much knowledge you already have of geography and social or political events of recent years. Writing well without answers to basic questions like, Where is Uganda? is impossible, but finding out the answer does not mean you need to cite the source necessarily. A general rule of thumb is that if you re referring to information available in multiple sources, it s considered common knowledge and you do not need to cite it.
The answers to the above question, for example, does not require citation (East Africa) but if you want to quote more specific information, expert opinion on the resistance or the exact numbers of child soldiers, then you d need to cite your source. Know that you are not required to use sources beyond the speech and using sources in a way that you d have to cite may sidetrack you from your chief goal of rhetorical analysis. Not filling in your own gaps of common knowledge, however, may weaken your paper (like not knowing Hurricane Katrina primarily devastated New Orleans, LA, for example). So learn a little something along the way, but don t turn a rhetorical analysis into a research paper.
MLA Format
You will need to cite the speech on a separate works cited page. See Resources tab for more guidance.
Click Next at the top right of the screen to navigate through each page in order.
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