analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment

In a related study using a training corpus, Laver et al. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He's walking out, like, with big high-fives, smiling, laughing. Read Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. JENNIFER MERCIECA: Thank you for having me. Have students discuss the elements of an argument that they plan on addressing. MERCIECA: Absolutely. and appeals before you start. More often however, such displays correspond to scatterplots, principal component analysis views, or correspondence analysis figures (Lebart et al., 1998; Greenacre, 2017). Table 4 presents these distributions, in percentage, over the nine candidates. Some places to look for speeches include: American Rhetoric: This has lists of famous speeches with full text and audio/visual for most. Given a sentence as input, this system is able to add the corresponding POS tag to each token. PSQ's distinguished contributors are leading scholars and professionals in political science, history, and communications. In LIWC, the generation of the word lists was done based on the judgments of three experts instead of simply concatenating various existing lists. So scholars call that stochastic terrorism. Of course, behind this person, a political program must also appear. Providing the most over-used terms is sometimes not enough to have a clear understanding of the candidates position on a given issue. Pataki (R), Jindal (R), Lessig (D)) or just appear in one (e.g. Basic-level words tend to be short. Here's an example of a rhetorical essay introduction to a speech from president trump: Rhetorical Essay Introduction - Example. 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. Hillary appears more feminine than the other candidates, using more I than we, and showing a higher frequency in the category Human interest (e.g. Choose from (a) Alfred Binet, (b) Howard Gardner, (c) Arthur Jensen, (d) Lewis Terman, (e) Robert Sternberg, and (f) David Wechsler. Here the candidate wants to put forward his competence in generating balanced budgets as Governor of Ohio. Students then evaluate the impact of the 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. <>/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>> Skills: In completing this assignment, you will practice the following skills that are essential to your success at MCC and your professional life beyond school. Pine Creek Company completed 200,000 units during the year at a cost of $3,000,000. 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. Looking at her most specific sentences, Clinton tends to produce rather long sentences reflecting a more complex reasoning. This phenomenon appears in other languages and countries when analyzing electoral speeches as, for example, in France (Labb and Monire, 2008b). According to this formulation, when all word types appearing before the h-point are functional words, the PTC value is 0. 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}. Rhetorical Analysis Of John F. Kennedy's Inauguration Speech 929 Words | 4 Pages 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. Remind students that the writer of the speech is sometimes not the person who delivered the speech, for example, and this will surprise some students. 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. endobj 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. 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. MERCIECA: Yeah, so one of Trump's rhetorical strategies has been to use ad baculum, which is Latin and means threats of force or intimidation. On the other hand, Bush, Paul, and, to a lesser extent, Cruz are closer to OMalleys PTC value, being able to present alternative formulations or covering more distinct subjects. O The repetition emphasizes the principles of freedom. 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. What are bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity? 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. Theres always a story behind the composition of the speech.). tweets, blogs, chats) was used by OConnor et al. In other words, the text P0 contains significantly more occurrences of the corresponding term than expected by a uniform distribution over the whole corpus. The following rhetorical strategies were analyzed: metaphors, metonymies, analogies, pronouns, the active or passive voice . In your essay, you will identify strategies and analyze how the speaker uses them to represent his or her position. 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. On the bottom part, one can find the Democrats, with a shorter distance between Clinton and Sanders than with OMalley. In this campaign, none of the adjectives is very frequently used, but more verbs can be observed (e.g. 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. When used appropriately, this strategy can allow for a well-developed and persuasive approach to communication, whether in writing or everyday conversation. O to highlight differences between opposing sides. identify an authors purposeful manipulation of language. Barack Obama Inaugural Address: Analysis Introduction. Consider posing questions such as. 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. SVM and nave Bayes) can be trained to classify congressional speeches according to political parties. So when you have a president using . Some persons never appear in a TV debate (e.g. The tone shifts throughout the selection. Nearly everything we read and hear is an argument. Take the students to the library and allow them to research their speeches. To generate Fig. The author wants to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and remarks. SHAPIRO: You point out that President Trump is much more eager than any of his predecessors to dehumanize his opponents. These language devices can be used across written and spoken mediums to manage the listener's views. O A person is attacked rather than an argument. Former President Clintons I Have Sinned Speech. The analysis of the most frequent terms reveals some important themes of the 2016 primary election. The Where? . The frequency table reveals that some lexical terms can appear before the h-point. To define an overall measurement of the style, various studies have proposed different measures. When considering overall stylistic indicators (see Table 3), Clinton, OMalley, and Sanders present a high LD value as well as a higher number of BW and TTR ratio than the mean. The last row of Table 4 reports the values of this Q-index for all candidates. His writing is uses many analogies. In another study, Yu (2013) reveals that (political) feminine figures tend to use emotional words more frequently and employ more personal pronouns than men. As it is extracted from a transcript, the sentence is not necessarily syntactically perfect. I think that it'll be interesting to see what happens next. Peer Response Handout: Students use this worksheet to examine and answer questions regarding their peer's essay. Students explore the ways that powerful and passionate words communicate the concepts of freedom, justice, discrimination, and the American Dream in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. In common, one can find the terms people, or country. 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%). In this figure, the longest distance (0.510) connects Paul and OMalley, and the second longest distance (0.496) links Trump to OMalley. Traditionally, teachers have encouraged students to engage with and interpret literaturenovels, poems, short stories, and plays. Presidents are also using very frequently the words government, world, and the adjectives free, great, or new. the Congress) and these studies are mainly grounded on the written form. (2010) analyze the rhetoric of H. Clinton during the 2008 presidential election. Unsurprisingly, the article the and the verb be (lemma of the word types am, is, are, was, etc.) This is a good date to look at famous speeches and what they include and why. This assignment requires students to look for those elements. Then, they can share some of their thinking about the argumentative structure and rhetorical devices used to make the speech effective. 1 depicts three main groups, one Democrat, and two Republicans. As another frequently used word, one can see say (five candidates), country, know, go (four candidates), and president, think for three candidates. 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. Mandela's written speech is eloquently written, in flowing sentences with dramatic and convincing language. Cruz, Paul, Clinton, Sanders) tend to prefer using the pronoun I, at least during an electoral campaign. More broadly, rhetorical strategies also include rhetorical devices and rhetorical appeals. The specific sentences extracted from Sanders answers explain clearly his positions with respect to Wall Street, some of the large companies, or on education. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions 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. Canada, Qubec, France (1945-2000). Also, the analysis indicated three contrastive themes of religion, time, and participant . Applying this procedure, the term specificity can be computed according to the text P0. The thesis statement should answer the following question: What makes this speech an effective argument and worthy of making this list? 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. This analysis is based on the thematic concentration of a text, providing a first overview at the recurrent topical terms used by each candidate. This estimator has the drawback of being instable, tending to decrease with text length (Baayen, 2008). Single speeches. However, the binomial formulation is easier to use and gives a good approximation. Search for other works by this author on: As a second stylistic indicator, the lexical density (denoted LD in. In this example, terms having a Z score larger than 5.0 are depicted in italics. Obama uses rhetoric to achieve presenting his message of creating hope and change together in America while fixing the economic and social challenges and issues left behind from the previous president. In the second sub-section, an intertextual distance is presented and used to derive graphs representing stylistic and topical affinities between the candidates. Download. 1. What was the speaker up against? Les mots qui nous gouvernent. But more importantly, why? After all the election is the process to select one person. 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. According to several overall stylistic indicators, candidate Trump clearly adopted a simple and direct communication style, avoiding complex formulation and vocabulary. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. For Clinton, the term affordable must be related to the Affordable Care Act (or health insurance reform). Ignoring the punctuation, the type the, is, or law each occur twice. A speech analysis is an evaluation of a speech. From overall stylistic measurements shown in Table 3, Ted Cruz appears with higher values than the mean. 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. What happens in an ad hominem persuasive technique? 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). (2003) describe a methodology to extract political positions from texts. On the other hand, OMalley shows the smallest Q-index value indicating more a text oriented toward description. Similar themes appear under several candidates with different terminology such as caliphate (Bush), Islamic (Cruz), ISIL (OMalley). Subjects: . 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). What is the impact of the loaded language in this paragraph? In a similar vein, Yu (2008) demonstrates that machine learning methods (e.g. Note. Times of crisis in America can be defining moments in a political career and many have had the opportunity to change the national climate with their words and mastery of rhetorical . Oftentimes, students assume the speaker is the author, and thats sometimes not the case. Traditionally, teachers have encouraged students to engage with and interpret literaturenovels, poems, short stories, and plays. identify elements of argument within a speech. 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. The beginning finished goods inventory was 25,000 units at$310,000. Table 3 indicates that the percentage of BW varies from 18.3% (Trump) to 26.4% (Cruz, and Sanders). Our first analysis considers the most frequent lemmas occurring in the oral interventions of the candidates during the TV debates of the primaries. endobj So the way you do it is you pass a tax plan like the tax plan I've introduced: a simple flat tax, 10 percent for individuals, and a 16 percent business flat tax, you abolish the IRS and here's the critical point, Maria, the business flat tax enables us to abolish the corporate income tax, the death tax, the Obamacare taxes, the payroll taxes, and they're border-adjustable, so every export pays no taxes whatsoever. (T. Cruz, 14 January 2016), And I'll tell you, Hugh you know, it's interesting now that Donald promises that he will appoint justices who who will defend religious liberty, but this is a man who, for 40 years, has given money to Jimmy Carter, to Joe Biden, to Hillary Clinton, to Chuck Schumer, to Harry Reid. (T. Cruz, 25 February 2016). 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. But I watch you a lot. As depicted in Figs 1 and 2, Cruz represents a distinctive fraction of the Republican party. All rights reserved. Note. 3), one can concludewith less than 1% chance of errorthat the term is significantly over-used in P0. The method of analysis was to locate expressions where linguistic choices seem to have been made in order to convey certain views. Their analysis will consider questions such as What makes the speech an argument?, How did the author's rhetoric evoke a response from the audience?, and Why are the words still venerated today? Also grounded on several dictionaries (or categories), Young and Soroka (2012) describe how one can detect and measure sentiments appearing in political texts. 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. To compute this value, one can divide the vocabulary size (number of types) by the text length (number of tokens). Cruz adopts an opposite style, focusing more on topical forms and expressions. appear regularly in the first two ranks. Moreover, the statements are certainly authored, at least in part, by a team of speechwriters. number, inserts). They might not answer them, you know, as honestly as they could, but, you know, generally they would answer - give some kind of answer. 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. The top ten most frequent lemmas according to TV debates. Which sentence from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a bandwagon appeal? You may wish to share information from the ReadWriteThink.org lesson. This aspect could be related to her first years at the White House as an overqualified First Lady who wanted to play a principal role in politics (e.g. Allow students to select a speech from the. To reflect the style, one can consider the k top most frequent lemmas from our electoral corpus. Political texts have been the subject of various studies discussing different aspects of them. To define the lemma of each token, the part-of-speech (POS) tagger developed by Toutanova et al. Two speeches during the American presidential campaign of 2008 are analyzed: one speech . Basic-level words are easily remembered; those messages will be best recalled that use basic-level language. (Lakoff and Wehling, 2012, p. 41). Me and the people? As shown in Table 1, Paul and OMalley correspond to the smallest values, both being present for a relatively short period of time during this electoral campaign. He supports his claim by using massive amounts of parallel structure and strong word choice. 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. Which quotation from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a hasty generalization? Which type of appeal does Reagan use in this part of the speech? SHAPIRO: Tell us about the significance of that, those actual physical threats. Differentiations between political parties can however be observed as, for example, studies based on tweets (Sylwester and Purver, 2015). 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. Former governors tend to use more frequently the we than the I (e.g. 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 ./.. 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). 1, only the functional words (409 entries) have been used to reflect the style of each candidate. This value indicates that Trump prefers to reuse the same words and expressions, repeating his main ideas and convictions. A candidate who wants to stay in the race must put forward him/her-self. Who is Reagan's intended audience for this part of his speech? The article aims to reveal the similar tendencies in rhetorical speeches used by the political leaders. (2010) to estimate the popularity of the Obama administration. These examples show that Cruzs rhetoric is more complex with the highest LD mean and the largest percentage of BW (see Table 3). This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. 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. Check the links to the online resources (in Websites section) make sure that they are still working prior to giving out this assignment. stream Trump or Clinton). In 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on this day. Based on this definition, one can read some examples of the most specific sentences per candidate. Whether the speech is meant to inform, persuade, or entertain, it can be analyzed for its rhetorical intent. In the Brown corpus, the top ten most frequent lemmas are as follows: the, be, of, and, to, a, in, he, have, it. Speeches are special kinds of arguments and should be analyzed as such. 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. Moreover, these examples demonstrate the frequent use of symploces (repetition of the same formulation, e.g. What would you put at the top of the list? Carson (R) or Christie (R)). They defined the psychological portrait both on single measurements (e.g. She did not like the press and the media and, in return, they do not like her much either. The last example illustrates how Trump can push away his opponents to place himself in the center of the debate. Our findings must be confirmed by other studies comparing other electoral campaigns and taking into account the written form (e.g. With this choice, the person can be viewed by the audience as distant and cold (Pennebaker, 2011). Copyright 2021 NPR. MERCIECA: You see them respond. xksg#N=f%qI>P$EHF& 1E]~O6m6lzf~?|\N?xX-O?m6jF/:'g gMN7~-_/NLf/_4Y!'Y#;rlS?5/~|lxR:M` 00:00 / 00:00. The h-point is defined as the point where the frequency is equal to the rank. To achieve this objective, this study analyzes the oral communication forms used by the candidates during the TV debates. O It calls attention to the urgency of the message. He argues about the values of hard work and taking responsibility for paving your own way to success, even though the obstacles seems difficult. The questions that you can use to examine a text's rhetorical situation are in Chapter 6.2. Which rhetorical technique does this paragraph demonstrate? A Computer-based Analysis, Getting Started: Describing the Grammar of Speech and Writing, Quantitative analysis of US presidential inaugural addresses, Experiments on authorship attribution by intertextual distance in English. To avoid this problem, a better computation is provided in (Covington and McFall, 2010) or (Popescu, 2009), suggesting taking the moving average of TTR. An antanagoge uses a negative and positive statement in one. Work with students to identify warrants, claims, and appeals. Anne Hutchinson was a prominent figure in the religious and political landscape of colonial America. These personality measurements were in agreement with different opinion polls. Speeches are special kinds of arguments and should be analyzed as such. One can see the presence of expressions related to the dialogue between candidates (Senator Sanders by Clinton, Donald with Cruz, Jeb under Trump). ReadWriteThink Notetaker: Students use this interactive tool to help them track their notes they take in preparation for their essay. MERCIECA: And those are ways of, you know, attacking in the moment but also signaling to his followers that no one should trust the media. 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. Select two options. Maria Engberg, Iben Have and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen (eds), About Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, About the European Association for Digital Humanities, About the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, 4 Evaluation of Stylistic Characteristics of the Candidates, 5 Evaluation of Topical Characteristics of the Candidates, http://observer.com/2016/11/email-reveals-clinton-camp-spied-on-sanders-delegates-before-convention/, https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/about_us/legal/notices, Receive exclusive offers and updates from Oxford Academic, Copyright 2023 EADH: The European Association for Digital Humanities. YouTube). This date in history marks the inauguration of a number of U.S. Presidents. 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). Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. Due to space limitations, not all possible candidates have been retained. In a few words, Trump is able to talk not about a single but a few topics. What is Reagan's main purpose in this passage? 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. Me and the Congress?). 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. Thus, which keywords or expressions can well describe each candidate and can be used to denote his/her difference? Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address Rhetorical Analysis. The reason is, a writer studies rhetorical or persuasive techniques used by the author to influence his . The verb phrase is used most frequently by Trump with the largest percentage of verbs and adverbs and the lowest frequencies of nous, determiners, and prepositions. As shown previously, the h-point is rather small, and thus, the words reflecting more the style (e.g. B) A person is attacked rather than an argument. 2. As in all papers, the analysis must include an introduction, body, and conclusion. One of the elements of doing a rhetorical analysis is looking at a text's rhetorical situation. How might worldwide demand for gasoline affect the economy of the Gulf coastal plain? The following remarks illustrate these aspects. Therefore, the two forms of communication must be analyzed separately. You ask a lot of stupid questions. head, ache, sleep). Webb (D)) or two debates (e.g. 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. Those terms correspond to recurrent thematic words or expressions on which the author wants to insist. Pathos-based rhetorical strategies are any strategies that get the audience to "open up" to the topic, the argument, or to the author.

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