Persuasive Speech Analysis: Process

I really liked the way I delivered my speech. It helped that I was speaking about something I was passionate about, because it allowed me to vary my inflection. But I wouldn't have been able to do that without a long time researching and adding logos, ethos, pathos, and other rhetorical devices in order to make my speech more convincing. 

My speech was mostly logos, and I struggled to make some parts ethos and pathos, because I didn't know how to connect with my audience on an ethical and emotional level. Instead, I just stuck to logos: logic, statistics, and facts. I think, in this sense, I need to improve on research; I didn't want to bore my audience by just spitting out fact after fact after fact. In the end, though, it's what I ended up doing.

Even though I had mostly logical arguments, my favorite was the first sentence - a rhetorical question: "Did you know that every single piece of plastic still exists?" I hoped that it caught my audience's attention. However, I'm really proud that I was able to choose a topic that I was thoroughly interested in and really believed in. And at first, I wanted to do something related to Feminism - however, there weren't any ballots that I found that related to women's rights...at least, nothing that appealed to me.

So, I went to #2 on my list of passions: the environment. Knowing that only recently California opted to ban the plastic bag and that there was a lot of backlash against it, I decided to convince my classmates a) why the plastic bag is detrimental to the environment, and b) how reusable bags are better.

If I could do the research process over again, I'd opt to use pathos or ethos better; like I said earlier, I hoped that I didn't bore my audience.