Rhetorical Analysis Of Axel By Dr. Wendy Troxel

In November of 2016 at the TEDxManhattanBeach Conference, Dr. Wendy Troxel delivered her powerful speech, “Why schools should start later for teens.” She effectively convinces her audience to take action against public policy and to ponder how the lack of sleep affects teenagers in negative ways. Dr. Troxel achieves this by employing her use of strong appeals, style details, and persuasion to prove her objective. Troxel uses ethos to give her speech more credibility through her own knowledge. Dr. Wendy Troxel is a senior behavior and social scientist at RAND Corporation for research and development. In her free time, she teaches psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh where she received her Ph.D. in clinical-health psychology (“Wendy M. Troxel”). She received a license as a clinical psychologist and is a certified behavioral sleep medicine specialist. During her speech, she even mentions that she is a sleep researcher and, “so [she] knows far too much about sleep and the consequences of sleep loss. I know that I'm depriving my son of the sleep he desperately needs as a rapidly growing teenager.” This ethical appeal demonstrates her full knowledge on the topic at hand and makes her more credible to her audience. The speaker …show more content…
She uses words such as brutal, reckless, and robbing. These powerfully charged words can be heard in everyday language but her use of them has a great impact. For example, at the end of her speech you can hear a bit of this strong dictation Troxel uses in part of her call to action: “So tomorrow morning, when coincidentally we get to set our clocks back by an hour and you get that delicious extra hour of sleep, and the day seems a little longer, and a little more full of hope, think about the tremendous power of sleep.” Her strong diction held the audience’s interest and pushes them to think about the effects of low sleep on teenagers around the