After being the target of public humiliation and keeping silent for almost twenty years, Monica Lewinsky walked onto the Ted stage and shared with the audience her personal experience as a victim of cyber bullying and humiliation, as well as her calling for a more compassionate and empathetic world. Her persuasive speech titled “The Price of Shame” is well written, organized and delivered, and is worth learning from. Lewinsky delivered this speech in Canada, a developed country where most people are highly educated and have daily access to Internet. And her audiences, as shown in the video, are most middle-aged adults with plenty of life experiences,
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When she was trying to show how much she was hurt by public shaming, she vividly described the setting where she was required to authenticate the taped phone call in: “I’m sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel underneath humming fluorescent lights.” By creating a mental image with her words, Lewinsky brought the audience back to the scene of her being humiliated. She also described the emotions she had at that time: “Scared and mortified, I listen… deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don 't even recognize.” By choosing specific and powerfully adjectives such as “mortified” and “ashamed,” she made the audience able to feel her in that situation and get involved intimately (Beebe, 192). She might have already evoked their empathy and compassion at that …show more content…
For example, when she was stating that the situation of cyber-bullying is very severe nowadays, she used the statistics from organizations in UK and Netherland to deepen the impression and enhance her credibility. She also smartly used examples that the audience might have already heard from social media or news, such as the leakage of private contents via Snapchatters, Jennifer Lawrence and other actor’s iCloud account being hacked, and Sony picture cyber-hacking, so the listeners would find the point she made very reasonable. Additionally, when she called for empathy and immediate change in behaviors, she quoted researcher Brene Brown’s statement, “Shame can’t survive empathy,” and mentioned social psychologist Serge Moscovici theory of minority influence to make the audience believe in the practicability of her
When she was trying to show how much she was hurt by public shaming, she vividly described the setting where she was required to authenticate the taped phone call in: “I’m sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel underneath humming fluorescent lights.” By creating a mental image with her words, Lewinsky brought the audience back to the scene of her being humiliated. She also described the emotions she had at that time: “Scared and mortified, I listen… deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don 't even recognize.” By choosing specific and powerfully adjectives such as “mortified” and “ashamed,” she made the audience able to feel her in that situation and get involved intimately (Beebe, 192). She might have already evoked their empathy and compassion at that …show more content…
For example, when she was stating that the situation of cyber-bullying is very severe nowadays, she used the statistics from organizations in UK and Netherland to deepen the impression and enhance her credibility. She also smartly used examples that the audience might have already heard from social media or news, such as the leakage of private contents via Snapchatters, Jennifer Lawrence and other actor’s iCloud account being hacked, and Sony picture cyber-hacking, so the listeners would find the point she made very reasonable. Additionally, when she called for empathy and immediate change in behaviors, she quoted researcher Brene Brown’s statement, “Shame can’t survive empathy,” and mentioned social psychologist Serge Moscovici theory of minority influence to make the audience believe in the practicability of her