IBDP English A – Speeches

Persuasive speeches are organized around clear formal frameworks, such as appeals to logic and emotional appeals, and also provide a chance for individual speakers to express themselves stylistically. Check the formal features of persuasive speeches.

Key Features

1. Ethos: the speaker establishes his or her credibility and may allude to a moral, social or spiritual leader with whom the audience cannot disagree.
2. Logos: clear, reasonable arguments, facts and statistics and quoting experts in the field are all ways of establishing a logical appeal.
3. Pathos: emotive language and imagery are ways of helping the audience empathize with the feelings of other – often vulnerable – people.
4. Persuasive: the speaker attempts to make his or her listener think in a certain way, believe something or take action.
5. Direct Address: the speaker tries to draw closer to the listeners by addressing them as ‘you’ – look out for the use of ‘we’ or‘ us’ to include the speaker and listener on the same side – and be wary of attempts to compliment the listener.
6. Modality: modal verbs are small but important words (such as ‘must’, ‘need’, ‘should’, ‘might,’ and so on) that reveal the speaker’s degree of certainty and strength of feeling. You can study modality here.
7. Rhetorical Devices: all kinds of rhythmical, structural, auditory and linguistic tricks can be employed by a skilled speaker. They are too many to list here, but rhetorical strategies can be studied and learned.
8. Logical Fallacies: also called ‘argumentation fallacies.’ Common fallacies in speeches are glittering generalizations, simplification and slippery slope.

Notes

Beginning your unseen analysis with observations about context, purpose and audience can set you up to make some thoughtful points and evaluations later in your response. Sometimes, this information needs to be inferred, but in many papers you can find it easily: look at the heading, the byline, and quickly scan the margins of the text for extra information provided to you by those who know it might be important. Good public speakers always know who their audience is and shape their use of language to appeal to their listeners. This response shows you how to begin with this in mind; then you can make much out of certain turns of phrase or choices of words and evaluate the likely success of the speaker’s arguments. For all its strengths, remember the response below is just one possible way of approaching this task; alternative analysis points and evaluations can be equally valid.