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analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment

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. endobj A Rhetorical Criticism and Analysis of President Ronald Reagan's The underlying hypothesis is to assume that the words serve as guides to the way the author thinks, acts, or feels. 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. Verified answer. None of the other Democrat candidates shows a clear intensive use of this pronoun. 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. endobj Oftentimes, students assume the speaker is the author, and thats sometimes not the case. 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. You may wish to share information from the ReadWriteThink.org lesson. What did the author have to keep in mind when composing the text? feminine, emotion, leadership), as well as her/his style (e.g. 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. The fifth section visualizes the relative position of each candidate in stylistic and topical spaces. 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? A) A limited number of options are presented. To measure the specificity attached to a term (Lafon, 1980; Muller, 1992), the corpus is split into two disjoint parts denoted P0 and P1. In this lesson plan, students consider the rhetorical devices in the address JFK delivered on January 20, 1961. During the 2016 primaries, the average value per candidate reported in Table 3 (label MSL) confirms this tendency with a mean varying from 21.9 (OMalley) to 13.7 (Trump). Can one be more precise than the simple sequence of isolated words such as balanced, budget, we (Kasich) or IRS, tax (Cruz)? The rhetorical situation analysis consists of four elements: audience, occasion, speaker and speech, each assessing the quality of speech. 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. In this assignment, I will closely analyse the speech made by Earl Spencer for the funeral of . Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. Primary Source Set Presidential Speeches - The Library of Congress Using graphical views to represent results of stylistic analysis is not new in quantitative linguistics studies. Cruz adopts an opposite style, focusing more on topical forms and expressions. How can one define them, and, from a statistical point of view, be sure that the proposed terms are significantly over-used by the candidate? As in Figs 1 and 2 reveals two Republican groups with the same members as in Fig. This estimator has the drawback of being instable, tending to decrease with text length (Baayen, 2008). As a first indicator, one can consider the mean sentence length (MSL) reflecting a syntactical choice. Assignment Analysis - Excelsior OWL PDF Analyzing the Rhetoric of JFK's Inaugural Address 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. 920. What are bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity? The tone shifts throughout the selection. Which best describes the type of appeal used in this part of the speech? The two closest candidates are Bush and Rubio (0.104), while the second shortest distance (0.114) joins Clinton with Sanders. 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). The method of analysis was to locate expressions where linguistic choices seem to have been made in order to convey certain views. In a similar vein, Yu (2008) demonstrates that machine learning methods (e.g. What is Speech Analysis? <> 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. 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). One can see the presence of expressions related to the dialogue between candidates (Senator Sanders by Clinton, Donald with Cruz, Jeb under Trump). his goal of persuading steel companies to lower their prices back down was successful due to his rhetorical strategy. PDF 2009:038 BACHELOR THESIS Linguistic features in political speeches Read the excerpt from Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. 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. Recently, such distance matrices can be represented by a tree-based visualization method respecting approximately the real distances between all nodes (Baayen, 2008). 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. Speeches are special kinds of arguments and should be analyzed as such. Sur la variabilit de la frquence des formes dans un corpus, The Little Blue Book: The Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic, Extracting policy positions from political texts using words as data, Five trends in presidential rhetoric: an analysis of rhetoric from George Washington to Bill Clinton, Building a large annotated corpus of English: the Penn Treebank, Principes et Mthodes de Statistique Lexicale, Analysis of Phylogenetics and Evolution with R, The end of year addresses of the presidents of the Italian Republic (19482006): discourse similarities and differences, The Secret Life of Pronouns. Looking at the most frequent lemmas in the Brown corpus (Francis and Kucera, 1982), the first two are the same, but after them the order changes. Looking at her most specific sentences, Clinton tends to produce rather long sentences reflecting a more complex reasoning. Reserve the library for Session Three so the students can do research on their speeches. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: He's walking out, like, with big high-fives, smiling, laughing. Pataki (R), Jindal (R), Lessig (D)) or just appear in one (e.g. MERCIECA: Yeah, he's absolutely used the fire hose of propaganda model. In this table, one can see another interesting fact related to the frequencies of the pronouns we and I. Trumps topics are relatively similar to those presented by Kasich and, with some distance, with those exposed by Paul. 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 . write an analysis of a speech with in-text documentation. So when you have a president using those rhetorical strategies sort of every day, you know, using it against the media, using it against members of his own party, using it against the political opposition, what it is essentially is a call to warfare. These personality measurements were in agreement with different opinion polls. This date in history marks the inauguration of a number of U.S. Presidents. D) A quick judgment is made without the use of evidence. He argues about the values of hard work and taking responsibility for paving your own way to success, even though the obstacles seems difficult. For Session Five, students should bring in their papers. C) Loaded language is used to appeal to emotions. For terms and use, please refer to our Terms and Conditions 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). With Trump and Clinton, one can find also relatively high PTC values compared to the other candidates. To understand the difference between word type and token, consider the following sentence: the law is harsh, but it is the law. These are effective because it brings almost a third dimension to his speech. As in all papers, the analysis must include an introduction, body, and conclusion. This set of words indicates the political electoral parlance or recurrent words used by politicians during an election. From this h-point, one can assume that types appearing before the hth rank are function words while those occurring after correspond to lexical or topical words (the very vocabulary). we, us, ours, or wars, war) or lemmas (dictionary entries such as we or war from the previous example) often lead to similar conclusions. In a few words, Trump is able to talk not about a single but a few topics. Rhetorical strategies are also sometimes called rhetorical modes. 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. Me and the people? This activity could happen as part of the prewriting process or after essays have been completed. L3 Read Write - Rhetorical Analysis on Anne Hutchinson's Trial- Kassey Begin the lesson by asking students what needs to be present in order for a speech to occur. The web-based communication (e.g. In the second sub-section, an intertextual distance is presented and used to derive graphs representing stylistic and topical affinities between the candidates. <> 3), one can concludewith less than 1% chance of errorthat the term is significantly over-used in P0. Also, the analysis indicated three contrastive themes of religion, time, and participant . Ignoring the punctuation, the type the, is, or law each occur twice. Rhetorical Analysis Of Prince Earl Spencer's Eulogy For Diana This value indicates that Trump prefers to reuse the same words and expressions, repeating his main ideas and convictions. SHAPIRO: Jennifer Mercieca of Texas A&M University, author of "Demagogue For President: The Rhetorical Genius Of Donald Trump.". A discourse analytic investigation into politicians' use of rhetorical The next section presents some related research in computer-based analysis of political speeches. 1 May 2023. With a longer distance, one can find the team Rubio and Cruz, with Bush having some affinities with this pair. So, you know, a typical president would sit down with a reporter and answer questions. PDF Rhetoric Strategies in the Presidents` Speeches: Ukrainian versus English The maximum value is shown in bold, and the minimum in italics. %PDF-1.7 Differentiations between political parties can however be observed as, for example, studies based on tweets (Sylwester and Purver, 2015). Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863. 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. What are the main purposes of this speech? Which phrases from the excerpt include loaded words intended to evoke a sense of fear? Which quotation from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a hasty . 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). And Donald Trump has wielded language like a cudgel. Download. The underlying idea is to quantify the activity by verbs while the descriptiveness of a text is represented by the proportion of adjectives. This assignment requires students to look for those elements. ReadWriteThink Notetaker: Students use this interactive tool to help them track their notes they take in preparation for their essay. Writing a rhetorical analysis essay is a bit different from other essay types. MERCIECA: First of all, he communicates like a demagogue and not like a president. Rhetorical analysis is a type of college essay in which the writer conducts a deep analysis of an object. 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. 6.3 What is Rhetorical Analysis? - A Guide to Rhetoric, Genre, and 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. evaluate to something in a careful and thoughtful way ad hominem reasoning that attacks the rather than the 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%). For Clinton, the term affordable must be related to the Affordable Care Act (or health insurance reform). On the bottom part, one can find the Democrats, with a shorter distance between Clinton and Sanders than with OMalley. In this figure, the longest distance (0.510) connects Paul and OMalley, and the second longest distance (0.496) links Trump to OMalley. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. A rhetorical analysis essay is assigned to students at different academic levels. 5. 4 0 obj Select two options. Ready to begin? Can one measure the stylistic distance between the candidates in both parties? But more importantly, why? Barnum, trying to, you know, redirect our attention and yet keep our attention all of the time. 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. On the other hand, Clinton could want to accentuate the human aspect and uses in this case the word immigrants. In this table, the personal pronouns are depicted in bold. Trump's intended audience while giving the speech is to his loyal supporters. 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. Make sure your introduction includes a thesis sentence or purpose and previews the main points covered in the body. We are in the final hours of Donald Trump's presidency. 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). Take the students to the library and allow them to research their speeches. 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 ./.. Both are preferring to repeat their arguments instead of introducing other subjects. This assignment requires students to look for those elements. Read the first three paragraphs of Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. 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. In common, one can find the terms people, or country. Check the links to the online resources (in Websites section) make sure that they are still working prior to giving out this assignment. Exploring the Power of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Words through Diamante Poetry. These examples indicate clearly that the style is changing over time. The top ten most specific terms per candidate. 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. The results indicated the prominent role of logos in presidential speeches as the most frequent strategy. Table 6 shows the top ten most over-used terms for each candidate. For the Democrats (Hillary Clinton, Martin OMalley, and Bernie Sanders), one can count nine TV debates held from 13 October 2015 (with five candidates) to 9 March 2016 (with two candidates). Such a selection strategy produces a low recall because many tweets about Obamas administration are not considered). 2 0 obj To compute this value, the word types are ranked according to their absolute frequency, from the most frequent to the least frequent one. Using the maximum likelihood principle, this probability is estimated as p(ti) = (tfi0 + tfi1)/n. Students write and record their own essays for a class blog by first completing a series of activities designed to get them thinking and writing about their experiences. hierarchical clustering built on the complete link) to visualize the different groups of candidates according to their stylistic profiles. Although a thorough understanding of effective oral, written, and visual communication can take years of study, the foundation of effective communication begins with rhetoric.

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analyzing rhetorical strategies in presidential speeches assignment