analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment

Analyzes president john f kennedy's use of parallelism, aristotle appeals, trustworthy information for other sources, and references back to himself. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Differentiations between political parties can however be observed as, for example, studies based on tweets (Sylwester and Purver, 2015). There are four rhetorical appeals: ethos, kairos, logos, and pathos. The Copyright 2021 NPR. A speech analysis is an evaluation of a speech. Which statement from a city mayor's speech is an example of hyperbole? Discuss a particular rhetorical device that the President used and the purpose it served. COMM 1020 classes include a Great Speeches assignment, where you need to find and analyze an influential speech from history. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. One possible approach is to extract a reduced set of specific sentences from each candidate. His writing is uses many analogies. MERCIECA: You see them respond. This value indicates that Trump prefers to reuse the same words and expressions, repeating his main ideas and convictions. When looking more at the content of their utterances, one can also observe differences between the candidates. Slight lexical differences can sometimes be important because, as mentioned by Lakoff and Wehling (2012), language is politics. The underlying hypothesis is to assume that the words serve as guides to the way the author thinks, acts, or feels. jobs/nns job/nn) or by substituting inflectional suffixes of verbs (e.g. Note. This date in history marks the inauguration of a number of U.S. Presidents. Go around to check and to monitor as students share their ideas and progress. Help students find the history behind the speech without getting too bogged down in the details. Moreover, the temporal period of the documents constitutes an important factor explaining the variations between presidents or prime ministers. 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. 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). Those Z score values can verify whether the underlying lemma is used proportionally with roughly the same frequency in both parts (Z score value close to 0). But he also threatens violence more than any of his predecessors have. X American historians and educators. 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. In this type of analysis, the object of analysis is mostly some kind of book, a movie, or any other type of creative work. <> For the Republican candidates (Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump), twelve TV debates were organized, from the 1st one held on 6 August 2015 with ten candidates, to the last one organized on 10 March 2016 with four candidates. In this session, students will respond each other's drafts using the, Determine and discuss the final due date with your students. 1 0 obj You will first choose the speech you will analyze for the final speech. More broadly, rhetorical strategies also include rhetorical devices and rhetorical appeals. Votez pour moi! In the current study, the stylistic elements will be the words appearing in the functional words list (409 entries), and used previously in defining the LD measure. 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. xksg#N=f%qI>P$EHF& 1E]~O6m6lzf~?|\N?xX-O?m6jF/:'g gMN7~-_/NLf/_4Y!'Y#;rlS?5/~|lxR:M` Hutchinson's rhetoric was powerful, persuasive, and often controversial. %PDF-1.7 Set up students inheterogeneousgroups of four. The analysis of the most frequent terms reveals some important themes of the 2016 primary election. A candidate who wants to stay in the race must put forward him/her-self. Download. B) A person is attacked rather than an argument. The following rhetorical strategies were analyzed: metaphors, metonymies, analogies, pronouns, the active or passive voice . To conclude briefly, previous studies have mainly analyzed governmental speeches, and less frequently the electoral speeches (Boller, 2004) or related messages (e.g. Step 1: Identify a Speech. Which quotation from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a hasty generalization? With this foundation, even if you are just starting out, you can become . 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. This assignment requires students to look for those elements. In this lesson plan, students consider the rhetorical devices in the address JFK delivered on January 20, 1961. Finally, the terms and sentences specific to each candidate will be computed and some examples will be given. The fourth describes and applies different measurements and methods to define and compare the rhetoric and style of the different candidates. Have them choose an audience to whom they would deliver an argumentative speech. 1 May 2023. What is Reagan's main purpose in this passage? Allow students to read and/or perform parts of the speeches out loud. Take the students to the library and allow them to research their speeches. Moreover, the first and last examples tackle one of the recurrent topics for the Democrat, for which the terms college, university, and tuition are specific in Sanders rhetoric. How? 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. His image was centered around his verbosity, egocentricity, and pomposity. endobj Beside time frame, exceptional events (e.g. They don't like seeing bad trade deals, they don't like seeing higher taxes, they don't like seeing a loss of their jobs where our jobs have just been devastated. (D. Trump, 10 March 2016), Im spending all of my money, Im not spending, I'm not getting any, I turned down, I turn down so much, I could have right now from special interests and donors, I could have double and triple what he's got. (D. Trump, 16 September 2015), Just excuse me, one second, Rand, if you don't mind, Rand, you know, you are on last, you do have your 1 percent. (D. Trump, 16 September 2015). When her campaign starts (14 April 2015), everything seemed simple and the road to the nomination seems without any real problem. Focusing on the USA, recent studies confirm these findings as, for example, using the State of the Union (Savoy, 2015a) or inaugural addresses (Kubt and Cech, 2016). Rhetoric is a useful strategy to utilize in speech making. The rhetorical situation is the context out of a which a text is created. development of genres of presidential speeches, and miscellaneous articles on various ancillary topics dealing with presidential rhetoric. And so you saw people sending pipe bombs to the media, you know, saying that Trump told them to do it. 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. In this example, terms having a Z score larger than 5.0 are depicted in italics. identify elements of argument within a speech. We are in the final hours of Donald Trump's presidency. When considering the most frequent lemmas, the candidates can be split into two groups, one using more frequently the pronoun I, and the second favoring more the we (which corresponds to candidates leaving the presidential run sooner). 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. Which sentence from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a bandwagon appeal? The "Great Speeches Collection" from The History Place are available here in print and in audio. None of the other Democrat candidates shows a clear intensive use of this pronoun. Kasich depicts the highest value leading clearly more toward action. You know, in a way, he's like an authoritarian P.T. Bligh M., Merolla J., Schroedel J. R., Gonzalez R. Hewings A., Painter C., Polias J., Dare B., Rhys M. Marcus M. P., Santorini B., Marcinkiewicz M. A. OConnor B., Balasubramanyan R., Routledge B. R., Smith N. A. Slatcher R. B., Chung C. K., Pennebaker J. W., Stone L. D. Toutanova K., Klein D., Manning C., Singer Y. Wilson T., Hoffmann P., Somasundaran S., Kessler J., Wiebe J., Choi Y., Cardie C., Riloff E., Patwardhan S. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. Le discours des premiers ministres qubcois: 1960-2005. Photo by Rowland Scherman. 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. Ready to begin? (2015) have proposed an h-point to measure the thematic concentration of a text. Consider posing questions such as. After peer response has taken place, use the. This study found a positive correlation between the presidential approval polls and positive tweets containing the hashtag #obama. 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. Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863. Heres one example from the past you could use: Continue the work from the previous session by distributing the, Tell students they will be getting additional practice with analyzing a speech as an argument by showing a short. The thesis statement should answer the following question: What makes this speech an effective argument and worthy of making this list? Taking another strategy, one can use the h-point splitting the vocabulary into two parts. Which quotation from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a hasty . Using the Diction system, Bligh et al. In a related study using a training corpus, Laver et al. . On this icy day in Washington D. C, Barack Obama gave his inaugural speech after taking the oath of office. Thus, for the entire corpus, the absolute frequency of the term ti is tfi0 + tfi1. A presidential electoral process can be positioned around one person or around a few issues (or programs). With this choice, the person can be viewed by the audience as distant and cold (Pennebaker, 2011). Usually Senators (e.g. 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. 4 0 obj Start your introduction paragraph with an attention-getter or hook. In other words, the text P0 contains significantly more occurrences of the corresponding term than expected by a uniform distribution over the whole corpus. Antanagoge. Ask students to share their outlines and thesis statements. Based on this perspective, the longest distance (0.251) connects Trump and OMalley, and the second longest (0.181) links Paul to OMalley. Similar themes appear under several candidates with different terminology such as caliphate (Bush), Islamic (Cruz), ISIL (OMalley). 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. The rhetorical modes include description, exposition, narration, and persuasion/argumentation. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He's walking out, like, with big high-fives, smiling, laughing. The two closest candidates are Clinton and Sanders (0.346), while the second shortest distance (0.360) joins Trump with Kasich. Senators Cruz or OMalley have a more sophisticated communication style, employing longer sentences and a more complex lexicon. And we've seen that has really specific results. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH. In this essay, we will analyze the rhetorical strategies used by Anne Hutchinson in her sermons . To measure the specificity attached to a term (Lafon, 1980; Muller, 1992), the corpus is split into two disjoint parts denoted P0 and P1. appear regularly in the first two ranks. Included on this site is audio of famous speeches of the 20th century, as well as information about the speeches and background information on the writers. 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. Pataki (R), Jindal (R), Lessig (D)) or just appear in one (e.g. O The repetition emphasizes the principles of freedom. O to explain why military action is necessary And he lets them know that they shouldn't trust anyone but him. 1 obtained using the R software (Paradis, 2011; Saitou and Nei, 1987). 1. This computation technique has been adopted. 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. Rhetorical Analysis Of John F. Kennedy's Inauguration Speech 929 Words | 4 Pages The Eloquent Woman: contains famous and not-so-famous speeches by women on all sorts of issues as well as . Request Permissions, Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress. functional words) are rather limited. During this primary election, Donald Trump presents clearly an atypical figure, employing short sentences, a reduced vocabulary, repeating the same arguments with simple words (see Table 2). Tags may be attached to nouns (nn, noun, singular, nns noun, plural, nnp proper noun, singular), verbs (vb, lemma, vbg gerund or present participle, vbp non-3rd-person singular present, vbz 3rd-person singular present), adjectives (jj, jjr adjective in comparative form), personal pronouns (prp), prepositions (in), and adverbs (rb). More recently, the web-based communication channels have been studied, but in this perspective, those studies are using more often tweets and less frequently blogs, or audio and video media (e.g. % 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). The top ten most specific terms per candidate. 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). Thus, the analysis of the most frequent ones is certainly a good starting point, as shown in the first sub-section. To analyze the rhetoric and style of presidential writings, the first quantitative linguistics studies focused on the word usages and their frequencies. Look, I have the greatest respect for Senator Sanders and for his supports and I'm going to keep working as hard as I can to reach as many people of all ages about what I will do, what the experience and the ideas that I have that I will bring to the White House and I hope to have their support when I'm the Democratic nominee. (H. Clinton, 17 January 2016), I think now what I've called for is counsel for every child so that no child has to face any kind of process without someone who speaks and advocates for that child so that the right decision hopefully can be made. (H. Clinton, 11 February 2016), Lets make the Affordable Care Act work for everybody. (H. Clinton, 4 February 2016). 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.". He does it even in interviews. The candidates who stayed longer in this campaign have a clear preference for the I over the we. Virginia ranked among the largest, wealthiest, and most populous colonies in 1775, and her political and military support for independence would be crucial for success. 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. Carson (R) or Christie (R)). Check your understanding of various theories on the nature of intelligence by matching the names of their originators with the brief descriptions of the given theory's main theme. O It calls attention to the urgency of the message. The set of all distinct word types forms the vocabulary, denoted by V, while the text length is represented by n. Some statistics about candidates speeches and comments. The remaining variations can be largely explained by the speaker. However, as mentioned by Biber and Conrad (2009, p. 262): Language that has its source in writing but performed in speech does not necessarily follow the generalization [written vs. oral]. (2010) analyze the rhetoric of H. Clinton during the 2008 presidential election. Such a sentence can be defined as the one having the largest number of over-used terms. Types of Rhetorical Strategies. Of course, other models can be used as, for example, the hypergeometric one (Baayen, 2008) which could be viewed as the exact distribution. Moreover, usually the we is more associated with the government, the president, or the prime minister (Pennebaker, 2011). Rhetoric can be defined as the ability to determine how to best communicate in a given situation. 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. Using the maximum likelihood principle, this probability is estimated as p(ti) = (tfi0 + tfi1)/n. This fact is confirmed by recent studies: One finding of cognitive science is that words have the most powerful effect on our minds when they are simple. 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. President Lincoln was a skilled statesman, orator, and . Ask students to consider how the author manipulates the audience using tone, diction, and stylistic devices. As one can see from his most specific terms and sentences, Cruzs concerns are related to a reform of the fiscal system, and the health care system. A better solution is to apply a clustering method (e.g. But more importantly, why? Trump's intended audience while giving the speech is to his loyal supporters. According to several overall stylistic indicators, candidate Trump clearly adopted a simple and direct communication style, avoiding complex formulation and vocabulary. You ask a lot of stupid questions. 1 is present in the elaboration of Fig. Barnum, trying to, you know, redirect our attention and yet keep our attention all of the time. ReadWriteThink Notetaker: Students use this interactive tool to help them track their notes they take in preparation for their essay. These are effective because it brings almost a third dimension to his speech. such as press releases; Labb and Monire, 2013). Jacques Savoy, Analysis of the style and the rhetoric of the 2016 US presidential primaries, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Volume 33, Issue 1, April 2018, Pages 143159, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqx007. rhetorical devices also helped in analyzing Obama's rhetorical strategies to understand the connection of the president's ar guments with respect to its logos, ethos, and pathos. . 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. As another aspect, one can view that the preferred pronoun is we and not I. What was the speaker up against? I think that Joe Biden will be a much more responsible communicator than President Trump has been, and so we'll see if that sort of evens things out. 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. They then analyze the suggestions made by Galbraith and Stevenson and compare them to the delivered version of the speech. Clinton appears with the largest number of tokens, followed by Sanders, Trump, Rubio, and Cruz. As the English language has a relatively simple morphology, working on inflected forms (e.g. h-point and most frequently used thematic words per candidate. Rhetorical Analysis: Compare and Contrast Four Speeches on Civil Rights Common Core Standards Purpose: The following four speeches explore the tensions found within the American ideals of individual liberty and universal equality. 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. Whether the speech is meant to inform, persuade, or entertain, it can be analyzed for its rhetorical intent. Me and the Congress?). 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. Make sure your introduction includes a thesis sentence or purpose and previews the main points covered in the body. As previously with Trump, the first person singular pronoun is clearly over-used (I, me). Work with students to identify warrants, claims, and appeals. Tree-based graphs are more appropriate when displaying similarities between author profiles or stylistic affinities between works (Labb and Labb, 2006; Labb, 2007). To understand the difference between word type and token, consider the following sentence: the law is harsh, but it is the law. Read the excerpt from Ronald Reagan's "Tear Down This Wall" speech. And Donald Trump has wielded language like a cudgel. <>/XObject<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 612 792] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S>> It's through this lesson that students are allowed to see how politicians and leaders manipulate and influence their audiences using specific rhetorical devices in a manner that's so effective that the speeches are revered even today. (2003) describe a methodology to extract political positions from texts. As depicted in Figs 1 and 2, Cruz represents a distinctive fraction of the Republican party. 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. Traditionally, teachers have encouraged students to engage with and interpret literaturenovels, poems, short stories, and plays. Which best describes the type of appeal used in this part of the speech? One of the elements of doing a rhetorical analysis is looking at a text's rhetorical situation. The results indicated the prominent role of logos in presidential speeches as the most frequent strategy. 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. Other intertextual measures have been chosen as, for example, the chi-square (Grieve, 2007), the Delta (Burrows, 2002), or using the Kullback-Leibler divergence (Zhao and Zobel, 2007). She was a Puritan woman who was outspoken about her beliefs and challenged the authority of the male-dominated Puritan church. In 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on this day. The last row of Table 4 reports the values of this Q-index for all candidates. In this table, the maximum value per grammatical category is shown in bold, and the minimum in italics. Like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you. _ :J~c%|l2\V-11fa[bOG;^Ba) QUnw(?HnKx6x. Subjects: . xZs8b5I&3;{p3_-Gv655-?-)_n g,~ "F+ ~|z-}swG\TssT^X^_,o,b/-_,k]$^Rd nW.rx The analysis of the style can be grounded on the relative frequencies of the different POS or grammatical categories. 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. For him, all appearances and comments on the media were an opportunity for self-promotion. Can one discover the rhetorical features that can explain a Trump or Clinton success? Read Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. Donald Trump's rhetoric has elicited comparisons to former Alabama governor George Wallace. The third section presents briefly some statistics about our corpus. 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. In LIWC, the generation of the word lists was done based on the judgments of three experts instead of simply concatenating various existing lists. 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). Several factors influencing the style are therefore fixed. It's important that we keep showing our students how powerful language can be when it's carefully crafted and arranged. As the English language has a relatively simple morphology, working on inflected forms (e.g. Canada, Qubec, France (1945-2000). 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. Those terms correspond to recurrent thematic words or expressions on which the author wants to insist. 8 25 You may wish to share information from the ReadWriteThink.org lesson. Ultimately, I analyzed whether Trump deviated from Campbell and Jamieson's (1985) W 2K Words to Know Fill in this table as you work through the lesson. endobj Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. This estimator has the drawback of being instable, tending to decrease with text length (Baayen, 2008). Remind them to refer to the. And so he'll say, you know, that's a dumb question. With Obama, the MSL decreases to 18.5 tokens/sentence. Choose from (a) Alfred Binet, (b) Howard Gardner, (c) Arthur Jensen, (d) Lewis Terman, (e) Robert Sternberg, and (f) David Wechsler. 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. That is the consequence of Trump's war rhetoric. 1986 Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress MERCIECA: Absolutely. Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information. Two types draw major attention: in augural addresses and "crisis" speeches. SHAPIRO: When you look in total at the changes that Trump has brought to presidential rhetoric, what do you see as the cumulative effect, especially right now when the U.S. is in a public health emergency, a reckoning about race and an inability to even agree on basic facts, like vaccines work or Biden won a free and fair election? happy, truly, win), and the future tense. 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). From a stylistic point of view, the Republican cluster {Bush, Cruz, Rubio} is well separated from the second Republican group {Kasich, Trump, and with a smaller additional distance Paul} as well as for the Democrats {Clinton, OMalley, Sanders}.

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analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment