analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment

Work with students to identify warrants, claims, and appeals. All rights reserved. The following rhetorical strategies were analyzed: metaphors, metonymies, analogies, pronouns, the active or passive voice . They can peruse print or online news sources to select a current event that interests them. Select two options. Based on this definition, one can read some examples of the most specific sentences per candidate. Those terms correspond to recurrent thematic words or expressions on which the author wants to insist. In this type of analysis, the object of analysis is mostly some kind of book, a movie, or any other type of creative work. Scholar Sonja K. Foss indicates the use of rhetoric is to communicate with one another in order to persuade, to facilitate understanding, to encourage change, and to tell us what reality is (Foss, 6). In addition, Table 4 reports the percentage of pronouns, names, conjunctions, and others forms (e.g. (2010) analyze the rhetoric of H. Clinton during the 2008 presidential election. As an interesting first case, one can analyze the most characteristic sentence from Kasichs comments, which is the following: I have balanced budgets, the federal budget, the state of Ohio budget, we're running a 2 billion dollar surplus, were up 400,000 jobs, and in Washington we were able to have significant job growth whenever we balanced the budget of which I was the architect. (J. Kasich, 6 February 2016). With a longer distance, one can find the team Rubio and Cruz, with Bush having some affinities with this pair. This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text. More than half the articles published by rhetorical critics during this period concern a single presidential speech. Yesterday, December 7, 1941a date which will live in infamythe United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. Cruz adopts an opposite style, focusing more on topical forms and expressions. Which rhetorical technique does this paragraph demonstrate? In this speech Patrick Henry (1736-1799) uses powerful rhetoric to convince influential, affluent, landed men of Virginia with much to lose to move past their current . 1 0 obj You saw people over the last few weeks planning an insurrection and, in fact, invading the Capitol and then later saying, I'm here because my president told me to be. For a given term ti, its absolute frequency in P0 is given by tfi0, and in P1 by tfi1. For all candidates, except for Cruz or Paul, the term people appears in the top four most frequent topical words. sad, worthless, cut, lost) and physical words (e.g. <>/Metadata 515 0 R/ViewerPreferences 516 0 R>> What type of rhetorical device does Reagan use when referring to freedom in this passage? Table 6 shows the top ten most over-used terms for each candidate. The third longest distance (0.180) can be found between Trump and Cruz. A Rhetorical Criticism and Analysis of President Ronald Reagan's Inaugural Address: Applying the Burkeian Dramatistic Pentad Approach Marzuki Jamil Baki bin Haji Mohamed Johar Bachik Eastern Illinois University This research is a product of the graduate program inSpeech Communicationat Eastern Illinois University. But he also threatens violence more than any of his predecessors have. If time permits, discuss how politicians and speech writers employ rhetorical strategies to influence the opinions of their audience members. 'we, us, ours', or 'wars, war') or lemmas (dictionary entries such as 'we' or 'war . These examples show that Cruzs rhetoric is more complex with the highest LD mean and the largest percentage of BW (see Table 3). Speeches are special kinds of arguments and should be analyzed as such. The sentence boundaries are defined by the POS tagger (Toutanova et al., 2003) and correspond to strong punctuation symbols (namely, periods, question, and exclamation marks). Slight lexical differences can sometimes be important because, as mentioned by Lakoff and Wehling (2012), language is politics. Consider posing questions such as. Rhetorical analysis is a type of college essay in which the writer conducts a deep analysis of an object. This present article examines the verbal style and rhetoric of the candidates of the 2016 US presidential primary elections. In the three sentences above, most of the words are less than six letters long (short words), and many of them are functional words (explaining his low LD). <>/ExtGState<>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/Annots[ 25 0 R 26 0 R] /MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> The analysis of the style can be grounded on the relative frequencies of the different POS or grammatical categories. In the Brown corpus, the top ten most frequent lemmas are as follows: the, be, of, and, to, a, in, he, have, it. Wiley has partnerships with many of the worlds leading societies and publishes over 1,500 peer-reviewed journals and 1,500+ new books annually in print and online, as well as databases, major reference works and laboratory protocols in STMS subjects. This is a good time to discuss the Rhetorical Triangle (Aristotelian Triad) or discuss a chapter on audience from an argumentative textbook. President Abraham Lincoln, in his inaugural address, addresses the topic of the civil war and its effects on the nation and argues that America could be unified once more. Of course, other models can be used as, for example, the hypergeometric one (Baayen, 2008) which could be viewed as the exact distribution. Nearly everything we read and hear is an argument. Just after the announcement of his candidacy for President (16 June 2015), his candidacy was mainly viewed as marginal, without pertinent interest, and without a real future. According to this formulation, when all word types appearing before the h-point are functional words, the PTC value is 0. Ask students to research the history of the speech. tweets, blogs, chats) was used by OConnor et al. His image was centered around his verbosity, egocentricity, and pomposity. Listeners should keep in mind the context of the situation involving the delivery and the audience-but a keen observer should also pay close attention to the elements of argument within the text. Providing the most over-used terms is sometimes not enough to have a clear understanding of the candidates position on a given issue. Based on US presidential speeches, that study presents the rhetorical and stylistic differences between the US presidents from Truman to Reagan, while a more recent book (Hart et al., 2013) exposes the stylistic variations from G. W. Bush to Obama. O to explain why military action is necessary This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. President Lincoln was a skilled statesman, orator, and . Thus, the analysis of the most frequent ones is certainly a good starting point, as shown in the first sub-section. Using the State of the Union addresses given by the Founding Fathers, this average value is 39.6 (with Madison depicting the highest MSL with 44.8 tokens/sentence). State the type of speech being analyzed and where it took place. This set of words indicates the political electoral parlance or recurrent words used by politicians during an election. In LIWC, the generation of the word lists was done based on the judgments of three experts instead of simply concatenating various existing lists. May 2018. This website contains audio of the Top 100 speeches of all time. From a lexical perspective, one can see the over-used term budget, usually more frequently used in governmental speeches than in the electoral ones. For the modern American president, the ability to be an effective public speaker can make all the difference in terms of the perception of the intelligence of any given commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth. happy, truly, win), and the future tense. Though the question may seem puzzlingtoo hard, or too simpleat first, students will eventually identify, as Aristotle did, the need for a speaker, a message, and an audience. Moreover, the temporal period of the documents constitutes an important factor explaining the variations between presidents or prime ministers. Students then evaluate the impact of the Presidents are also using very frequently the words government, world, and the adjectives free, great, or new. % A text is, however, a composite item in which one finds both the style with its lexical, syntactical, or discourse factors, and the recurrent words belonging to the topics. To measure the specificity attached to a term (Lafon, 1980; Muller, 1992), the corpus is split into two disjoint parts denoted P0 and P1. The pronoun we stays ambiguous (Who is behind the we? Here's an example of a rhetorical essay introduction to a speech from president trump: Rhetorical Essay Introduction - Example. Ultimately, I analyzed whether Trump deviated from Campbell and Jamieson's (1985) As demonstrated previously, Trump opted for a simple and direct communication style, preferring short sentences with simple words. His writing is uses many analogies. Beside time frame, exceptional events (e.g. SHAPIRO: You point out that President Trump is much more eager than any of his predecessors to dehumanize his opponents. Donald Trump's rhetoric has elicited comparisons to former Alabama governor George Wallace. With a growing open access offering, Wiley is committed to the widest possible dissemination of and access to the content we publish and supports all sustainable models of access. Cruz, Paul, Clinton, Sanders) tend to prefer using the pronoun I, at least during an electoral campaign. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience. This estimator has the drawback of being instable, tending to decrease with text length (Baayen, 2008). The presence of a strong leader is usually accompanied with a real change in the style and vocabulary of governmental speeches (Labb and Monire, 2003; Savoy, 2015c). family, man, person, etc.). 1 obtained using the R software (Paradis, 2011; Saitou and Nei, 1987). You ask a lot of stupid questions. _ :J~c%|l2\V-11fa[bOG;^Ba) QUnw(?HnKx6x. Rhetorical Analysis Of John F. Kennedy's Inauguration Speech 929 Words | 4 Pages In the following sentences, one can also see two topics, usually more related to the Democrats, namely education, and health care reform. Clinton appears with the largest number of tokens, followed by Sanders, Trump, Rubio, and Cruz. More precisely, this study has focused on the oral communication form using different TV debates in both political parties, a form less observed in previous studies. 2. When her campaign starts (14 April 2015), everything seemed simple and the road to the nomination seems without any real problem. None of the other Democrat candidates shows a clear intensive use of this pronoun. Select two options. What is the impact of the loaded language in this paragraph? Reagan achieves this by using parallelism, great diction choices, and . When a question is discussed, the choice of the word can make the difference. The technical term is basic level. The author uses rhetorical strategies to create a tone of pity and contempt for Phil, which shows how people who prioritize work over life are sad creatures who hurt the people around them. Using the LIWC system, Slatcher et al. Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address Rhetorical Analysis. Step 1: Identify a Speech. What is the purpose of presenting a false dilemma in a speech? What rhetorical devices aided the authors manipulation of his audience? With a positive Z score larger than a fixed threshold (e.g. In common, one can find the terms people, or country. The "Great Speeches Collection" from The History Place are available here in print and in audio. Set up students inheterogeneousgroups of four. Grounded on the MSL, LD, and BW indicators, one can see that Trump is adopting a more direct communication style, selecting simple words and producing short sentences. These results present also the stylistic evolution over more than two centuries and can be compared to those achieved using traditional methods as, for example, by Lim (2002). Request Permissions, Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. According to several overall stylistic indicators, candidate Trump clearly adopted a simple and direct communication style, avoiding complex formulation and vocabulary. the Congress) and these studies are mainly grounded on the written form. (2003) describe a methodology to extract political positions from texts. As an additional global stylistic measurement, the frequency of big words (composed of six letters or more, and denoted BW) can be analyzed (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010). As another example, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC; Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010) regroups different categories used to evaluate the authors psychological status (e.g. In this assignment, I will closely analyse the speech made by Earl Spencer for the funeral of . Data depicted in Table 4 indicate that OMalley is the candidate choosing most frequently the noun construction (largest percentage of nouns, and adjectives). YouTube). SHAPIRO: So as you study Trump's use of language, there are so many ways he is different from presidents who came before him. For Clinton, the term affordable must be related to the Affordable Care Act (or health insurance reform). Pathos-based rhetorical strategies are any strategies that get the audience to "open up" to the topic, the argument, or to the author. Of course, behind this person, a political program must also appear. The only time that you see presidents using the rhetorical strategy of reification, which is treating people as objects, is when they're using war rhetoric. With this choice, the person can be viewed by the audience as distant and cold (Pennebaker, 2011). Moreover, Cruzs explanations tend to include more names (see Table 4), and many of them (IRS, Maria, Obamacare, Donald, Carter, Biden, ) occur in these examples. The difference between these two candidates is characteristic, with OMalley more oriented toward an explanation requiring usually more nouns while Trump turns toward the action and its high usage of verbs. As another frequently used word, one can see say (five candidates), country, know, go (four candidates), and president, think for three candidates. Allow students to select a speech from the. Moreover, these examples demonstrate the frequent use of symploces (repetition of the same formulation, e.g. "Rhetorical force is achieved by the strategy of combining reiteration with contrast . The intensity of his ego can also be revealed by the fact that the most specific term in his dialogue is also the pronoun I (see Table 6). The Type-Token Ratio (TTR) or the relationship between the vocabulary size and the number of word types (Baayen, 2008) corresponds to our last global stylistic measure. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. All rights reserved. In the current study, two candidates (Clinton and Trump) have opted for centering their communication around their person. Canada, Qubec, France (1945-2000). Read the first three paragraphs of Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. As each candidate is represented by her/his remarks in the TV debates, one can compute a distance reflecting their similarities (Labb and Labb, 2006). During an electoral campaign, the word tax is clearly more recurrent than budget to discuss financial issue, in part because the term tax is closer to citizens perception than the budget is. Presidential Studies Quarterly SHAPIRO: While this is out of the ordinary for a president, where have we seen this kind of language in the past? Trump or Clinton). These language devices can be used across written and spoken mediums to manage the listener's views. On the other hand, OMalley or Cruz (TTR: 37.3) have opted for a larger coverage requiring a larger number of distinct words and phrases. 3), one can concludewith less than 1% chance of errorthat the term is significantly over-used in P0. 5. None of these terms appears here. Determine the cost of goods sold for 210,000 units, assuming a FIFO cost flow, a. causes the effective price to sellers to increase, b. affects the welfare of buyers of the good but not the welfare of sellers, c. causes the equilibrium quantity of the good to decrease, d. creates a burden that is usually borne entirely by the sellers of the good. The two closest candidates are Bush and Rubio (0.104), while the second shortest distance (0.114) joins Clinton with Sanders. On the bottom part, one can find the Democrats, with a shorter distance between Clinton and Sanders than with OMalley. It's important that we keep showing our students how powerful language can be when it's carefully crafted and arranged. The following remarks illustrate these aspects. MERCIECA: Well, I mean, when he dehumanizes people, when he tells his followers, you know, that you have to be forceful, you have to be strong TRUMP: Because you'll never take back our country with weakness - you have to show strength, and you have to be strong. . electoral speeches, party manifestos, Web sites of the candidates, social networks information flow). Peer Response Handout: Students use this worksheet to examine and answer questions regarding their peer's essay. Using the Diction system, Bligh et al. For example, no selected candidate is discussing really the problem of the national debt. 8 25 In your essay, you will identify strategies and analyze how the speaker uses them to represent his or her position. You know, in a way, he's like an authoritarian P.T. Bush, Kasich) with OMalley having a very distinctive style in this point of view. To have a better overall measurement of the topical concentration of a text, The intertextual distance between Text A and Text B is computed according to, This formulation assumes that both texts have the same length (, Vote for me. What is Speech Analysis? Copyright 2021 NPR. Le discours gouvernemental. To answer these questions, the current study will focus on the US primaries TV debates. 1 0 obj What is the main reason a speaker might use exclusive language? Applying this procedure, the term specificity can be computed according to the text P0. Students learn how to play "devil's advocate" by evaluating sports reforms, reading an engaging non-fiction article, and participating in a town hall meeting in which they represent the interests of various stakeholders to generate debate and develop critical thinking skills. After gaining skill through analyzing a historic and contemporary speech as a class, students will select a famous speech from a list compiled from several resourcesand write an essay that identifies and explains the rhetorical strategies that the author deliberately chose while crafting the text to make an effective argument. Exploring the Power of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Words through Diamante Poetry. The fifth section visualizes the relative position of each candidate in stylistic and topical spaces. To analyze the rhetoric and style adopted by the candidates during the primaries of the 2016 US primary election, the transcripts of the TV debates have been downloaded from the Internet (mainly from the Web site www.presidency.ucsb.edu). Like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you. In a rhetorical analysis project, it would be up to you, the analyzer, to point out this move and . 00:00 / 00:00. Washington, DC - Two decades ago, on May 1, 2003, then-US President George W Bush declared "major combat operations in Iraq have ended" in a speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln . These three speeches are President Barack Obamas speech to children in 2009, George H.W. Just considering the ten most frequent words, similar sets appearing with each candidate and the difference between them lies on their ranking as shown previously. Therefore, the two forms of communication must be analyzed separately. On the other hand, when all those types are lexical words, PTC reaches the maximum value of 1.0 or 100%. For example, G. W. Bush used more frequently the pronoun I, positive emotion words (e.g. Some of the terms depicted in Table 6 give some indications about this aspect as, for example, IRS, tax, amnesty with Cruz, fossil, fuel, Wall, Street with Sanders. This lesson has students explore freedom of speech by examining the Pledge of Allegiance from a historical and personal perspective and in relationship to fictional situations in novels. This research was supported, in part, by the NSF under Grant #200021_149665/1. This website includes information on finding and documenting sources in the MLA format. Wiley is a global provider of content and content-enabled workflow solutions in areas of scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly research; professional development; and education. Finally, the terms and sentences specific to each candidate will be computed and some examples will be given. Sanders answers and remarks are clearly more focused on a few topics. The class should discuss audience and the importance of identifying the audience for speeches, since they occur in particular moments in time and are delivered to specific audiences. One can complement this study by considering the terms ignored or used very infrequently in this primary election. stream Dont vote for the other one, Analysis Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R, Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Finding her voice: Hillary Clinton Rhetoric in the 2008 presidential campaign, Presidential Campaigns. Recently, such distance matrices can be represented by a tree-based visualization method respecting approximately the real distances between all nodes (Baayen, 2008). A modern president must be able to use speech and rhetoric to his or her strongest advantage to anticipate, address or mediate crisis (Davis & Gardner, 2012). Which sentence from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a bandwagon appeal? Ask students to consider how the author manipulates the audience using tone, diction, and stylistic devices. Myself and the future government? endobj In this table, the personal pronouns are depicted in bold. Make sure your introduction includes a thesis sentence or purpose and previews the main points covered in the body. Similar themes appear under several candidates with different terminology such as caliphate (Bush), Islamic (Cruz), ISIL (OMalley). And so you saw people sending pipe bombs to the media, you know, saying that Trump told them to do it. Students explore the "I Have a Dream" Foundation's website and brainstorm ways they can help themselves or others at their school achieve their educational dreams. Noah Serda On June 24, 1985, Reagan gave a speech at a fundraising event to try to help the Kennedy Library foundation create an endowment for the presidential library, Reagan talks about Kennedy in his speech to not only help the Kennedy library but to honor Kennedy in front of his family and to talk about his legacy. Provide a copy of the. number, inserts). Note. Rhetorical Analysis Of The Eulogy Of President Obama. Thank you. In this example, terms having a Z score larger than 5.0 are depicted in italics. In Table 5, the second row indicates the PTC values for all candidates, showing clearly that Sanders presents the highest PTC value (12.12%) while OMalley exposes the smallest (4.26%). The remaining variations can be largely explained by the speaker. Some places to look for speeches include: American Rhetoric: This has lists of famous speeches with full text and audio/visual for most. For example, "each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda . O Voting in the municipal election is a matter of life and death. The word debt appears in some utterances, but mainly in the context of the education debt for the Democrats. For Session Five, students should bring in their papers. the relative frequency of different pronouns, positive emotions) and using a set of composite indices reflecting the cognitive complexity, presidentially, or honesty of each candidate. Photo by Rowland Scherman. specifically the only three presidential speeches that have been designed for children. From a stylistic point of view, this corpus is homogenous, corresponding to an oral communication form, extracted from a short period of time, and with the same main objectives (convincing the people, answering questions, presenting their ideas and solutions). They need to understand the climate, but they do not need to be complete experts on the historical details in order to understand the elements of the speech. Rhetorical Analysis Essay Two: Speeches by US Presidents Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is for you to write a rhetorical analysis of two speeches. The author wants to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and remarks. Finally, the champion in the usage of I is Trump who clearly has adopted a distinct style in the campaign, putting the light more on his ego. Professor Mercieca, thanks for talking with us. Discuss the audience and the authors manipulation of the audience. We'll see. Note. In this assignment you will: Compare and contrast two Presidential speeches . To highlight the different styles adopted by the candidates, Biber and Conrad (2009) indicate that such a study should be based on ubiquitous and frequent forms. Such a sentence can be defined as the one having the largest number of over-used terms. The next section presents some related research in computer-based analysis of political speeches. I, me). And Donald Trump has wielded language like a cudgel. Essay Rubric: This rubric is used as a guide for students as they are writing their essay, and for teachers to use as a grading tool. The relationship of some candidates to their origin is also represented (Ohio with Kasich, Texas for Cruz, Kentucky with Paul, Maryland for OMalley). Note. They then draft two conclusions for their essay, select one, and reflect on what they have learned through the process. The underlying hypothesis is to assume that the words serve as guides to the way the author thinks, acts, or feels. One can count nine word tokens (or simply tokens) and six word types (or types). In this essay, I will analyze the rhetorical situation of the historical speech "The Challenger Address" delivered by the 40th president of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Former President Clintons I Have Sinned Speech. One of the elements of doing a rhetorical analysis is looking at a text's rhetorical situation. Have students discuss the elements of an argument that they plan on addressing. Such differences tend to be correlated with psychological factors. In a related study using a training corpus, Laver et al. feminine, emotion, leadership), as well as her/his style (e.g. Rhetorical strategies are also sometimes called rhetorical modes. This analysis is based on the thematic concentration of a text, providing a first overview at the recurrent topical terms used by each candidate. Our online platform, Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) is one of the worlds most extensive multidisciplinary collections of online resources, covering life, health, social and physical sciences, and humanities. In the Republican party, the federal debt is debated by Rubio, and marginally by Kasich, and Paul. Ask students to share their outlines and thesis statements. Grounded on this measure, one can compute the intertextual distance between all nine candidates. Even if pronouns are more frequent in dialogue or in oral form than in written communication (Biber and Conrad, 2009), the high frequency of I and we is a fundamental characteristic of political speech. Help students find the history behind the speech without getting too bogged down in the details. Looking at her most specific sentences, Clinton tends to produce rather long sentences reflecting a more complex reasoning. In other words, the text P0 contains significantly more occurrences of the corresponding term than expected by a uniform distribution over the whole corpus. Allow students to read and/or perform parts of the speeches out loud. From data depicted in Table 3, one can see that the TTR value reaches a minimum of 29.7 (Trump) to a maximum of 37.9 (OMalley). Knowing that this matrix is symmetric and that the distance to itself is nil, we still have (81 9)/2 values. The 2016 US presidential election was characterized by two figures, both unloved by the majority of Americans (Yourish, 2016). Usually Senators (e.g. Read the excerpt from Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech. Donald Trump instead attacks, right? A more general overview of using different computer-based strategy to detect and extract topical information from political texts can be found in (Grimmer and Stewart, 2013). Which type of appeal does Reagan use in this part of the speech? What is Reagan's main purpose in this passage? Accuracy and availability may vary. Here, rhetoric is defined as the art of effective and persuasive speaking, the way to motivate an audience, while language style is presented as pervasive and frequent forms used by an author for mainly esthetical value (Biber and Conrad, 2009). So scholars call that stochastic terrorism. The total number of lemmas in part P0 (or its length) is denoted n0, similarly with P1 and n1, and the length of the entire corpus is defined by n = n0 + n1. Many people assume that the speaker (president, senator, etc.) B) A person is attacked rather than an argument.

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