Gettysburg Address Rhetorical Devices

If the first sentence were taken alone, I would not expect what is to follow. However, the first three sentence correlate with each other. I think taking all three should be taken in together. The third sentence, in particular, is the actual topic sentence. The interesting thing about the first two sentences is that they unite Chief Joseph and General Howard, as they both feel the same thing. This is an interesting choice, as it is each other (I assume) that they have fought.
Grammatically, it is interesting to analyze this speech. Chief Joseph’s speech is written somewhat differently than an average piece of writing. He uses very few fanboys. The instance of a fanboy is the word and in sentence eight. Mostly, correlating ideas are separated …show more content…
Chief Joseph’s vocabulary is colloquial, while Lincoln’s is formal. I think that Chief Joseph’s colloquial vocabulary strengthens his piece. It is accessible to everybody and feels genuine. It makes it easy to sympathise with the emotion he presents. That is not to say that Lincoln’s formal vocabulary isn’t also a strength. His wording can be attributed to his position as president and the daunting task he had of commemorating the battle. It is appropriate for him to be formal and anything else would have felt out of …show more content…
It is a striking and powerful statement that communicates a big emotion in just a few sentences. I think the reader, or listener, of this might have expected something different than what was said. They might have expected to hear about how far human kind has come, how great a species we are, what a marvel scientists had accomplished, but instead he said just the opposite. He said how dwarfed he felt in the expanse of space, how little he was. I think the surprise of not reading what you expect to read makes the statement more powerful. The first sentence heavily uses adjectives. This choice is unexpected and powerful for what is being conveyed. He was able to describe the planet Earth as nobody before him ever had, as an outsider. He compares it to a pea and calls it pretty and blue. The use of the word pretty strikes me especially. What is a generally positive word becomes almost demeaning. He describes our entire world with a word so trivial as pretty. He is far enough away that the entire world fits inside the word pretty. These adjectives are powerful because they are surprising, ways that we have not yet heard the world