Can one measure the stylistic distance between the candidates in both parties? 10 Commonly Used Rhetorical Strategies (With Examples) A rhetorical analysis essay is assigned to students at different academic levels. One can complement this study by considering the terms ignored or used very infrequently in this primary election. 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). Abstract: This paper analyzes President Obama's rhetoric in his two inaugural addresses in order to determine how his presidential rhetoric conforms and violates current rhetorical traditions in inaugural addresses. Moreover, such analysis reveals more the style than the preferred themes. An indispensable resource for understanding the U.S. presidency, Presidential Studies Quarterly offers articles, features, review essays, and book reviews covering all aspects of the American presidency. Similar research has been conducted with other languages, such as Italian (Pauli and Tuzzi, 2009). Knowing that this matrix is symmetric and that the distance to itself is nil, we still have (81 9)/2 values. Anne Hutchinson was a prominent figure in the religious and political landscape of colonial America. Students study Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and work in groups to create a mural that depicts Dr. King's vision of peace. The personal pronouns are depicted in bold. Just after the announcement of his candidacy for President (16 June 2015), his candidacy was mainly viewed as marginal, without pertinent interest, and without a real future. Displaying directly the 9 9 matrix containing these distances has a limited interest. hierarchical clustering built on the complete link) to visualize the different groups of candidates according to their stylistic profiles. This is a good date to look at famous speeches and what they include and why. Table 6 shows the top ten most over-used terms for each candidate. In the Republican party, the federal debt is debated by Rubio, and marginally by Kasich, and Paul. Verified answer. Elizabeth uses all of the appeals logos, pathos, and ethos to convince all of her listeners to fight for her from the loyal follower to the greedy mercenary. of Illinois and Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. Direct students to, Remind students that their work will be evaluate using the. 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. 1 depicts three main groups, one Democrat, and two Republicans. 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. Rhetorical Analysis Of Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address It's important that we keep showing our students how powerful language can be when it's carefully crafted and arranged. Please complete the Lesson 11 assignment in a single Word document PDF Warm-Up in Presidential Speeches What did the author have to keep in mind when composing the text? President Lincoln was a skilled statesman, orator, and . The top ten most specific terms per candidate. When her campaign starts (14 April 2015), everything seemed simple and the road to the nomination seems without any real problem. 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. Read Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. Such differences tend to be correlated with psychological factors. These examples indicate clearly that the style is changing over time. From overall stylistic measurements shown in Table 3, Ted Cruz appears with higher values than the mean. 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. Two speeches during the American presidential campaign of 2008 are analyzed: one speech . What is the main reason a speaker might use exclusive language? He supports his claim by using massive amounts of parallel structure and strong word choice. This item is part of a JSTOR Collection. If time permits, discuss how politicians and speech writers employ rhetorical strategies to influence the opinions of their audience members. To analyze the rhetoric and style of presidential writings, the first quantitative linguistics studies focused on the word usages and their frequencies. In the current study, two candidates (Clinton and Trump) have opted for centering their communication around their person. Barack Obama Inauguration Speech 2009: Analysis - StudyCorgi.com <> h-point and most frequently used thematic words per candidate. 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. Usually Senators (e.g. SVM and nave Bayes) can be trained to classify congressional speeches according to political parties. Accuracy and availability may vary. tweets, blogs, chats) was used by OConnor et al. they dont like seeing ) in Trumps comments. Peer Response Handout: Students use this worksheet to examine and answer questions regarding their peer's essay. MERCIECA: It's been my pleasure. 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. health care reform in 1993). Yes, I do believe that now after the American people bailed Wall Street out, yes, they should pay a Wall Street speculation tax so that we can make public colleges and universities tuition-free. (B. Sanders, 11 February 2016), Why does the fossil fuel industry pay, spend huge amounts of money on campaign contributions? (B. Sanders, 11 February 2016), I do believe that in the year 2016 we have to look terms of public education as colleges as part of public education making public colleges and universities tuition free. (B. Sanders, 11 February 2016). What is Reagan's main purpose in this passage? By working with primary sources from the online collections of the Library of Congress, students can explore the people and events that shaped these speeches. A relatively high LD percentage indicates a more complex text, containing more information. The analysis of the style can be grounded on the relative frequencies of the different POS or grammatical categories. Differentiations between political parties can however be observed as, for example, studies based on tweets (Sylwester and Purver, 2015). Rhetorical Analysis Of The Eulogy Of President Obama. family, man, person, etc.). And what I mean by that is he took advantage of preexisting distrust and polarization and frustration, and he used rhetorical strategies that were designed to make all of those things worse. From these analyses, one can observe, for example, that governmental institutions tend to smooth out the differences between political parties when exercising command. What are the main purposes of this speech? Bush, Kasich) with OMalley having a very distinctive style in this point of view. A modern president must be able to use speech and rhetoric to his or her strongest advantage to anticipate, address or mediate crisis (Davis & Gardner, 2012). Finally, her email case and FBI investigations were a real concern for her image in the public, especially during the general election campaign. Despite the now-known election outcome, the candidates use of language during the primary season raises some pertinent research questions. Former governors tend to use more frequently the we than the I (e.g. Martnez and Gonzlez's (Citation 2012) study utilized Systemic Functional Linguistic meaning-making tools in analyzing U.S. presidential campaign speeches. Reagan Challenger Speech Teaching Resources | TPT PDF 2009:038 BACHELOR THESIS Linguistic features in political speeches MERCIECA: First of all, he communicates like a demagogue and not like a president. Subjects: . the relative frequency of different pronouns, positive emotions) and using a set of composite indices reflecting the cognitive complexity, presidentially, or honesty of each candidate. As another frequently used word, one can see say (five candidates), country, know, go (four candidates), and president, think for three candidates. Copyright 2021 NPR. 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. number, inserts). 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). 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%). Ask students to consider how the author manipulates the audience using tone, diction, and stylistic devices. None of the other Democrat candidates shows a clear intensive use of this pronoun. % Which statement from a city mayor's speech is an example of hyperbole? To define an overall measurement of the style, various studies have proposed different measures. The underlying idea is to quantify the activity by verbs while the descriptiveness of a text is represented by the proportion of adjectives. It studies the rhetorical strategies that help the speakers to achieve the desired goal effectively, and add persuasiveness to the addresses. The class should discuss audience and the importance of identifying the audience for speeches, since they occur in particular moments in time and are delivered to specific audiences. As an additional global stylistic measurement, the frequency of big words (composed of six letters or more, and denoted BW) can be analyzed (Tausczik and Pennebaker, 2010). 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. Once the speechwriter is identified, it is easier to find information on the speech. What happens in an ad hominem persuasive technique? What rhetorical devices aided the authors manipulation of his audience? For the modern American president, the ability to be an effective public speaker can make all the difference in terms of the perception of the intelligence of any given commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation on earth. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience. electoral speeches, party manifestos, Web sites of the candidates, social networks information flow). Students then evaluate the impact of the How President Trump's Rhetoric Has Affected U.S. Politics 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. To compute this value, one can divide the vocabulary size (number of types) by the text length (number of tokens). Rhetorical Analysis 2.Rev. docx.pdf - Rhetorical Analysis Wiley has published the works of more than 450 Nobel laureates in all categories: Literature, Economics, Physiology or Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Peace. They might not answer them, you know, as honestly as they could, but, you know, generally they would answer - give some kind of answer. When looking more at the content of their utterances, one can also observe differences between the candidates. O Voting in the municipal election is a matter of life and death. Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information. For example, "each one of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda . such as press releases; Labb and Monire, 2013). Types of Rhetorical Strategies. 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. On this icy day in Washington D. C, Barack Obama gave his inaugural speech after taking the oath of office. This estimator has the drawback of being instable, tending to decrease with text length (Baayen, 2008). 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. 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). Which quotation from Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war is an example of a hasty . They draw on their prior experience, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, graphics). Whether the speech is meant to inform, persuade, or entertain, it can be analyzed for its rhetorical intent. You will . 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. Assignment Analysis - Excelsior OWL Work with students to identify warrants, claims, and appeals. But I watch you a lot. Extreme values are depicted in bold. The method of analysis was to locate expressions where linguistic choices seem to have been made in order to convey certain views. 1 May 2023. % The third longest distance (0.467) can be found between Cruz and OMalley. endobj 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. In 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. was born on this day. His answers contain more nouns and names adopting a more descriptive rhetoric. Can one discover the rhetorical features that can explain a Trump or Clinton success? For example, no selected candidate is discussing really the problem of the national debt. These language devices can be used across written and spoken mediums to manage the listener's views. endobj This article has analyzed the style and the rhetoric used by the candidates during the 2016 US primary election. Using graphical views to represent results of stylistic analysis is not new in quantitative linguistics studies. Speeches are special kinds of arguments and should be analyzed as such. Obama stated many things in his speech, which Clark states related to four rhetorical strategies: The power of allusion, parallelism, the "two-ness" of texture, and autobiography. Due to space limitations, not all possible candidates have been retained. 4 0 obj analyze a speech for rhetorical devices and their purpose. Rhetorical Analysis Of John F. Kennedy's Inauguration Speech 929 Words | 4 Pages She did not like the press and the media and, in return, they do not like her much either. Me and the people? He's also changed the way political leaders talk. 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. 00:00 / 00:00. Read the excerpt from Franklin Roosevelt's request for a declaration of war. Table 3 indicates that the percentage of BW varies from 18.3% (Trump) to 26.4% (Cruz, and Sanders). According to this formulation, when all word types appearing before the h-point are functional words, the PTC value is 0. DyI3d\a W=? >26}?=#^j4dA]pT@/ k= QtdE{~OL_DoQ*V\H'9/hP^EI0mewZ. 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. To answer these questions, the current study will focus on the US primaries TV debates. W 2K Words to Know Fill in this table as you work through the lesson. Rhetorical Analysis: Compare and Contrast Four Speeches on Civil Rights . Rhetorical Analysis: Nelson Mandela's Inagural Speech This assignment requires students to look for those elements. This new representation has been chosen, and the result is displayed in Fig. YouTube). O to rally the support of the American people for war. This phenomenon appears in other languages and countries when analyzing electoral speeches as, for example, in France (Labb and Monire, 2008b). 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. 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. his goal of persuading steel companies to lower their prices back down was successful due to his rhetorical strategy. Oftentimes, students assume the speaker is the author, and thats sometimes not the case. South Dakota State University Open PRAIRIE: Open Public Research Access <>/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>> Table 4 presents these distributions, in percentage, over the nine candidates. So, you know, a typical president would sit down with a reporter and answer questions. 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). When used appropriately, this strategy can allow for a well-developed and persuasive approach to communication, whether in writing or everyday conversation. This assignment requires students to look for those elements. 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. The rhetorical modes include description, exposition, narration, and persuasion/argumentation. This is a good time to discuss the Rhetorical Triangle (Aristotelian Triad) or discuss a chapter on audience from an argumentative textbook. As a first indicator, one can consider the mean sentence length (MSL) reflecting a syntactical choice. Which type of appeal does Reagan use in this part of the speech? Such a sentence can be defined as the one having the largest number of over-used terms. The sentence boundaries are defined by the POS tagger (Toutanova et al., 2003) and correspond to strong punctuation symbols (namely, periods, question, and exclamation marks). O It calls attention to the urgency of the message. 1 0 obj 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. Some places to look for speeches include: American Rhetoric: This has lists of famous speeches with full text and audio/visual for most. This computation technique has been adopted. For a given term ti, its absolute frequency in P0 is given by tfi0, and in P1 by tfi1. (4) Analyzing Rhetorical Strategies in Presidential Speeches You may wish to share information from the ReadWriteThink.org lesson. Here, rhetoric is defined as the art of effective and persuasive speaking, the way to motivate an audience, while language style is presented as pervasive and frequent forms used by an author for mainly esthetical value (Biber and Conrad, 2009).