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.

MLK Speech Analysis Reflection: Product

I'm proud of the way I was able to identify pathos, ethos, and logos in the speech analysis for our summative. I liked the way I was able to annotate the speech, because with all the practice that we did before, it really prepared me for how to actually annotate the speech. The annotations helped me discover which rhetorical device to use when writing down the quote. However, I think I need to work on identifying rhetorical devices. It was easy for me to realize that a certain section was either pathos, ethos, or logos, but within that section it was a little difficult for me to figure out which rhetorical device it was using. If I was able to do it again, I would perhaps listen to the speech again more carefully, and while doing that note the tone with which Dr. King said parts of the speech. Perhaps this way it would be much easier for me to figure out which rhetorical device.