analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment

5. The present study is focusing on two less explored aspects, namely, the electoral campaign on the one hand, and on the other, the oral form. Refer to recent elections, if possible, and/or bring in flyers and/or brochures. <> 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. Preparation Historical Background and Context On January 20, 1961, a clerk of the US Supreme Court held the large Fitzgerald family Bible as John F. Kennedy took the oath of office to become the nation's 35th president. We are in the final hours of Donald Trump's presidency. The fifth section visualizes the relative position of each candidate in stylistic and topical spaces. 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. tgm=-~dH++jD$f+[zwZT]R-QnGG!B_>L{\DIm$N`=jD`j8=P:&Wm/? With this choice, the person can be viewed by the audience as distant and cold (Pennebaker, 2011). Lead a discussion of the speech as an argument with regard to purpose and intent. One can consider that electoral speeches delivered by the candidates correspond also to an oral communication form and thus can be included in our corpus. The specific sentences extracted from Sanders answers explain clearly his positions with respect to Wall Street, some of the large companies, or on education. happy, truly, win), and the future tense. MERCIECA: First of all, he communicates like a demagogue and not like a president. SHAPIRO: You point out that President Trump is much more eager than any of his predecessors to dehumanize his opponents. This analysis is based on the thematic concentration of a text, providing a first overview at the recurrent topical terms used by each candidate. For example, from the sentence But I also know this problem is not going away, the POS tagger returns But/cc I/prp also/rb know/vbp this/dt problem/nn is/vbz not/rb going/vbg away/rb ./.. Accuracy and availability may vary. In a few words, Trump is able to talk not about a single but a few topics. These personality measurements were in agreement with different opinion polls. From the set of the ten most over-used terms corresponding to H. Clinton depicted in Table 6, the first following sentence contains four (Senator, Sanders, to, I). . You will . Trumps style appears, here too, as distinct from the others, providing his answers and comments around functional words. All rights reserved. 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. Table 6 shows the top ten most over-used terms for each candidate. The rhetorical brilliance of Trump the demagogue - The Conversation . For example, starting with Bush, one can follow the branch until reaching the central point, then one can go along the lines leading to the second person (e.g. Great Speeches Assignment - COMM 1020: Public Speaking - Research Splitting the vocabulary into two distinct parts is relatively known in stylistic (Damerau, 1975), authorship attribution (Argamon and Levitan, 2005; Stamatatos, 2009), or in quantitative linguistics studies (Tuzzi, 2010). O It calls attention to the urgency of the message. Grounded on this measure, one can compute the intertextual distance between all nine candidates. One can see the presence of expressions related to the dialogue between candidates (Senator Sanders by Clinton, Donald with Cruz, Jeb under Trump). Although a thorough understanding of effective oral, written, and visual communication can take years of study, the foundation of effective communication begins with rhetoric. 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 article aims to reveal the similar tendencies in rhetorical speeches used by the political leaders. 3.3 Understanding the Writing Assignment; 3.4 Creating the Thesis; 3.5 Revising Your Draft(s) . (2010) to estimate the popularity of the Obama administration. From a topical perspective, our analysis generates a map showing the affinities between candidates. Also, the analysis indicated three contrastive themes of religion, time, and participant . But I watch you a lot. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes. What was the speaker up against? Moreover, the statements are certainly authored, at least in part, by a team of speechwriters. 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. Reagan achieves this by using parallelism, great diction choices, and . On the bottom part, one can find the Democrats, with a shorter distance between Clinton and Sanders than with OMalley. According to this formulation, when all word types appearing before the h-point are functional words, the PTC value is 0. This assignment requires students to look for those elements. More generally, Fig. Elizabeth uses all of the appeals logos, pathos, and ethos to convince all of her listeners to fight for her from the loyal follower to the greedy mercenary. Rhetorical Analysis Of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics). Speeches are special kinds of arguments and should be analyzed as such. Some persons never appear in a TV debate (e.g. Work with students to identify warrants, claims, and appeals. Then, they can share some of their thinking about the argumentative structure and rhetorical devices used to make the speech effective. 3 0 obj Rhetorical Analysis Of John F. Kennedy's Inauguration Speech 929 Words | 4 Pages There are four rhetorical appeals: ethos, kairos, logos, and pathos. What happens in an ad hominem persuasive technique? In this assignment you will: Compare and contrast two Presidential speeches . Obama stated many things in his speech, which Clark states related to four rhetorical strategies: The power of allusion, parallelism, the "two-ness" of texture, and autobiography. With the immigration issue for example, Trump prefers using the term immigration presenting this question more at an abstract level. Bush, Kasich) with OMalley having a very distinctive style in this point of view. The underlying idea is to quantify the activity by verbs while the descriptiveness of a text is represented by the proportion of adjectives. Here's an example of a rhetorical essay introduction to a speech from president trump: Rhetorical Essay Introduction - Example. 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 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. The two closest candidates are Bush and Rubio (0.104), while the second shortest distance (0.114) joins Clinton with Sanders. State the type of speech being analyzed and where it took place. the United States of America. By working with primary sources from the online collections of the Library of Congress, students can explore the people and events that shaped these speeches. As another aspect, one can view that the preferred pronoun is we and not I. They might not answer them, you know, as honestly as they could, but, you know, generally they would answer - give some kind of answer. Finally, have students work on writing their papers by writing their introductions with an enticing grab or hook. If time permits, have students share their work. In the Republican party, the federal debt is debated by Rubio, and marginally by Kasich, and Paul. Jennifer Mercieca studies American political rhetoric at Texas A&M University, and she's the author of "Demagogue For President: The Rhetorical Genius Of Donald Trump.". As another frequently used word, one can see say (five candidates), country, know, go (four candidates), and president, think for three candidates. We have launched the new ReadWriteThink.org and we would love to get your feedback: Students practice the Pre-AP strategy called SOAPSTone, identifying important parts of the Gettysburg Address and comparing it with John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech. 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. 1 0 obj With a similar value and following the same tendency, one can find Trump and Paul. This website includes information on finding and documenting sources in the MLA format. Note. President Barack Obama made history by being America's first African-American president. 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). Cruz adopts an opposite style, focusing more on topical forms and expressions. It should be noted that, regarding the four indices, Clinton is closer to OMalley or Cruz than to Trump. In other words, the text P0 contains significantly more occurrences of the corresponding term than expected by a uniform distribution over the whole corpus. Peer Response Handout: Students use this worksheet to examine and answer questions regarding their peer's essay. Too often, however, the spoken word is left unanalyzed, even though the spoken word has the potential to alter our space just as much than the written. I think that it'll be interesting to see what happens next. Beside time frame, exceptional events (e.g. 1 depicts three main groups, one Democrat, and two Republicans. To measure the specificity attached to a term (Lafon, 1980; Muller, 1992), the corpus is split into two disjoint parts denoted P0 and P1. Ask students to research the history of the speech. 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. Recently, such distance matrices can be represented by a tree-based visualization method respecting approximately the real distances between all nodes (Baayen, 2008). O The repetition emphasizes the principles of freedom. The sentence is longer that the MSL (18.3) for this candidate. They can peruse print or online news sources to select a current event that interests them. grounded on personal pronouns (Pennebaker, 2011)). Some places to look for speeches include: American Rhetoric: This has lists of famous speeches with full text and audio/visual for most. Two speeches during the American presidential campaign of 2008 are analyzed: one speech . Ready to begin? 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. Through content analysis this thesis was designed to determine whether persuasive TRUMP: What a stupid question. SHAPIRO: What do you mean when you say that? Assignment Analysis - Excelsior OWL And so you saw people sending pipe bombs to the media, you know, saying that Trump told them to do it. Applying this procedure, the term specificity can be computed according to the text P0. 1. Ultimately, I analyzed whether Trump deviated from Campbell and Jamieson's (1985) This estimator has the drawback of being instable, tending to decrease with text length (Baayen, 2008). Where? X European trade unionists 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. But more importantly, why? For example, "each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda . What rhetorical devices aided the authors manipulation of his audience? A conclusion draws the main findings of this study. Using also some lists of words, Hart (1984) has designed and implemented a political text analyzer called Diction. Which best describes the type of appeal used in this part of the speech? Read Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. 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). 7. This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. And Donald Trump has wielded language like a cudgel. Presidential Studies Quarterly (PSQ) is the only scholarly journal that focuses on the most powerful political figure in the world the president of the United States. One can also see that all values are relatively close to 19, except for Trump who is adopting an even more simple and direct communication style. The last row of Table 4 reports the values of this Q-index for all candidates. 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 this paper a rhetorical analysis of Obama's addresses was performed using a form of genre criticism. Two main syntactic constructions can be selected by the speaker, namely, using more frequently verb phrases (composed of verbs and adverbs), or choosing more often noun phrases (with nouns, adjectives, determiners, and prepositions). W 2K Words to Know Fill in this table as you work through the lesson. Traditionally, teachers have encouraged students to engage with and interpret literaturenovels, poems, short stories, and plays. To compute this value, one can divide the vocabulary size (number of types) by the text length (number of tokens). family, man, person, etc.). Table 3 indicates that the percentage of BW varies from 18.3% (Trump) to 26.4% (Cruz, and Sanders). Based on this definition, one can read some examples of the most specific sentences per candidate. they dont like seeing ) in Trumps comments. Me and the Congress?). From a lexical perspective, one can see the over-used term budget, usually more frequently used in governmental speeches than in the electoral ones. The author wants to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and remarks. More broadly, rhetorical strategies also include rhetorical devices and rhetorical appeals. In this study, P0 corresponds to all comments by a given candidate, while P1 denotes all other comments and remarks. The two closest candidates are Clinton and Sanders (0.346), while the second shortest distance (0.360) joins Trump with Kasich. Due to space limitations, not all possible candidates have been retained. Rhetorical Analysis 2.Rev. docx.pdf - Rhetorical Analysis The appeal to political sentiment: An analysis of Donald Trump's and Hillary Clinton's speech themes and discourse strategies in the 2016 US presidential election. Bushs speech to children in 1991, and Ronald Reagans speech to children in 1988. Barnum, trying to, you know, redirect our attention and yet keep our attention all of the time. Explain. tweets, blogs, chats) was used by OConnor et al. Analysis and History of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address - Study.com Rhetorical Strategies in Speeches: Rhetorical devices are often utilized during speeches. Rhetorical Analysis Of The Eulogy Of President Obama. Can one be more precise than the simple sequence of isolated words such as balanced, budget, we (Kasich) or IRS, tax (Cruz)? The second proposes to consider four overall stylistic measurements and applies them to the different candidates while the last sub-section describes the differences in the distribution of the grammatical categories between candidates. This computation technique has been adopted. Oftentimes, students assume the speaker is the author, and thats sometimes not the case. The suggested approach is rather similar to OConnor et al.s work (2010), counting the frequency of occurrence of words appearing in a dictionary of positive or negative emotion words. O to highlight differences between opposing sides. ReadWriteThink Notetaker: Students use this interactive tool to help them track their notes they take in preparation for their essay. A RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF DONALD J. TRUMP'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS DANIELLE F. DICKERSON 2019 In this thesis, I utilized three distinct theories (ideographs, dramatism, and the bully pulpit) to rhetorically analyze and assess President Trump's 2017 inaugural address. Speeches are special kinds of arguments and should be analyzed as such. Entering History: Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King, Jr. Freedom of Speech and Automatic Language: Examining the Pledge of Allegiance, Giving Voice to Students Through "This I Believe" Podcasts, For Argument's Sake: Playing "Devil's Advocate" with Nonfiction Texts, And in Conclusion: Inquiring into Strategies for Writing Effective Conclusions, Developing Evidence-Based Arguments from Texts. Table 2 reports the top ten most frequent lemmas for each selected candidate. Direct students to, Remind students that their work will be evaluate using the. For example, from data depicted in Table 2, Trump, Clinton, and Sander prefers using I instead of we, while Kasich, OMalley, and Bush are using more frequently the pronoun we. Ignoring the punctuation, the type the, is, or law each occur twice. No general theory specifies precisely the k value, but a value from 200 to 500 represents a pertinent choice justified by various studies (Savoy, 2015b). This value indicates that Trump prefers to reuse the same words and expressions, repeating his main ideas and convictions. On the other hand, OMalley shows the smallest Q-index value indicating more a text oriented toward description. Thus, the analysis of the most frequent ones is certainly a good starting point, as shown in the first sub-section. 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. And we've seen that has really specific results. The US 'war on terror', 20 years after 'mission accomplished' These are effective because it brings almost a third dimension to his speech. 25 Examples of Rhetorical Strategies in Famous Speeches 1, only the functional words (409 entries) have been used to reflect the style of each candidate. analyze a speech for rhetorical devices and their purpose. Slight lexical differences can sometimes be important because, as mentioned by Lakoff and Wehling (2012), language is politics. With this foundation, even if you are just starting out, you can become . If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming. In the current study, two candidates (Clinton and Trump) have opted for centering their communication around their person. NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric, about how President Trump has changed the way Americans talk about politics, the government and each other. For example, G. W. Bush used more frequently the pronoun I, positive emotion words (e.g. He supports his claim by using massive amounts of parallel structure and strong word choice. 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). Sanders answers and remarks are clearly more focused on a few topics. 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. This article has analyzed the style and the rhetoric used by the candidates during the 2016 US primary election. On the other hand, when all those types are lexical words, PTC reaches the maximum value of 1.0 or 100%. His writing is uses many analogies. 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. Getting to Know You: Developing Short Biographies to Build Community, Phonic Generalizations in Chrysanthemum, My World of Words: Building Vocabulary Lists, The Day Jimmy's Boa Taught Cause and Effect, Literary Scrapbooks Online: An Electronic Reader-Response Project, background and information sheet for teachers, 10-minute clip of a contemporary presidential speech, Queen Elizabeths speech to the troops at Tilbury. "Rhetorical force is achieved by the strategy of combining reiteration with contrast . As in all papers, the analysis must include an introduction, body, and conclusion. identify elements of argument within a speech. development of genres of presidential speeches, and miscellaneous articles on various ancillary topics dealing with presidential rhetoric. Table 4 confirms that Trump owns a style very distinct than the others. This assignment is a quick way to review thesis writing and give students repetitive practice and quickly analyzing nonfiction writing. Teachers can choose to have students focus on one or more historical inaugurations and analyze the speeches by looking at the historical challenges facing the nation, topics discussed in the. It includes:- a copy of President Ronald Reagan's "Challenger" speech with numbered paragraphs- a graphic organizer that asks students to identify SOAPSTone and Ethos, Pathos, and Logos elements (along with the scaffolding of paragraph numbers to return to)- a key to the graphic organizer- an open ended question prompt for formative or summative As previously with Trump, the first person singular pronoun is clearly over-used (I, me). Taking another strategy, one can use the h-point splitting the vocabulary into two parts. (PDF) Persuasive Language in Presidential Speeches: A - ResearchGate In another study, Yu (2013) reveals that (political) feminine figures tend to use emotional words more frequently and employ more personal pronouns than men. Set up students inheterogeneousgroups of four. Take the students to the library and allow them to research their speeches. Allow students to read and/or perform parts of the speeches out loud. analyze the effects of the rhetorical devices on the delivered speech. Help students find the history behind the speech without getting too bogged down in the details. Thank you. 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. To compute this value, the word types are ranked according to their absolute frequency, from the most frequent to the least frequent one. You may also use the glossary to help you. Usually Senators (e.g. These examples indicate clearly that the style is changing over time. Also grounded on several dictionaries (or categories), Young and Soroka (2012) describe how one can detect and measure sentiments appearing in political texts. Comparing and contrasting procedures for text clustering, Italian Journal of Applied Linguistics - Statistica Applicata, Affective news: the automated coding of sentiment in political texts, Classifying party affiliation from political speech, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Language and gender in congressional speech, The Author 2017. To define an overall measurement of the style, various studies have proposed different measures. Antanagoge. Which quotation from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a hasty . This website contains audio of the Top 100 speeches of all time. In the midst of a troubled nation, President Bush effectively uses kairos, rhetorical appeals, and awareness of audience to provide a sense of security for those worrying about their country, a feeling of comfort for those grieving their loss, and a promise of revenge for those angered by the events of the day. 8 25 And what I mean by that is he took advantage of preexisting distrust and polarization and frustration, and he used rhetorical strategies that were designed to make all of those things worse. Which type of appeal does Reagan use in this part of the speech? 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. Similar research has been conducted with other languages, such as Italian (Pauli and Tuzzi, 2009). his goal of persuading steel companies to lower their prices back down was successful due to his rhetorical strategy. Professor Mercieca, thanks for talking with us. (They might be surprised at the answer. What are the main purposes of this speech? In this essay, we will analyze the rhetorical strategies used by Anne Hutchinson in her sermons . Rhetorical Analysis Of Justice Speech - 1951 Words | Bartleby A large negative Z score (less than -) indicates than the corresponding term is significantly under-used in P0. The students will discuss their speeches and their research thus far. To conclude briefly, previous studies have mainly analyzed governmental speeches, and less frequently the electoral speeches (Boller, 2004) or related messages (e.g. PSQ's distinguished contributors are leading scholars and professionals in political science, history, and communications. As it is extracted from a transcript, the sentence is not necessarily syntactically perfect. Page ! From George Washington to George W. Bush, Delta: a measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship, Testing the thematic concentration of text, Cutting the Gordian Knot: the moving-average type-token ratio (MATTR), The use of function word frequencies as indicators of style, Quantitative authorship attribution: an evaluation of techniques, Text as data: the promise and pitfalls of automatic content analysis methods for political texts, Verbal Style and the Presidency. Cruz, Paul, Clinton, Sanders) tend to prefer using the pronoun I, at least during an electoral campaign. The method of analysis was to locate expressions where linguistic choices seem to have been made in order to convey certain views. After peer response has taken place, use the. Alliteration: Two or more words in a row that start with the same sound. feminine, emotion, leadership), as well as her/his style (e.g. It is assumed that, for any term ti, its distribution follows a binomial law, with parameters n0 and p(ti) representing the probability of the term ti being randomly selected from the entire corpus.

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analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment