Academic, Civic, and Professional Situations
This assignment was made for the class, Rhetoric and Public Address. In this essay, I addressed the rhetorical techniques used by two orators from the present day.
Their civic discourse was through public speaking. From this assignment, I learned how to compare and contrast the professional rhetorical techniques used by two different types of speakers, President Barack Obama and George Marshall. The analysis of the orators taught me how different rhetorical approaches in speeches can result in different outcomes of influence on the audience.
This assignment was different for me in comparison to other works I have worked on because I am focusing on relevant orator’s use of rhetoric. Rather, in other words, rhetorical devices were mainly focused on people from the past such as Aristotle. This difference in time and date significantly changes the methods in which those devices are used. I have gained a new perspective on how to approach rhetoric through civic discourse.
Based on this new knowledge I look forward to reading modern texts on popular news media websites. Reading more relevant texts will be helpful moving forward when approaching my Capstone, which I plan to focus on modern, and relevant news media. This new knowledge will also be useful when comparing different contexts or time periods of rhetorical speeches. It would be interesting to see if there are any significant changes, or if there has been any change at all.