Rhetorical Analysis Of Choices And Change

From marriage to graduation, speeches often help mark major milestones in life. Barbara Bush’s speech to the graduating class at Wellesley college is no different. She spoke to an exuberant crowd and carried across a powerful message about what choices life has to offer each of the students. To understand why this speech is so highly regarded one must examine the use of rhetoric in the speech and how it brings power to her words. Barbara Bush’s speech, “Choices and Change”, was an incredibly effective speech due to her use of examples that appealed to her audience, the structure of the message, and in how the speech was presented. To make a speech really reach the audience a speaker must make the material easily understandable and relatable …show more content…
The first major example is the game "Giants, Wizards, and Dwarfs," in which a child is shown to want both individualities and to not be excluded. This appealed to the audience as the students could reminisce about their childhood while at the same time seeing themselves as the little girl and wanting to be themselves and mark their place in society. The second example was her use of the current media buzz over the event in which Alice Walker, a famous author and civil rights activist, was seen to be a better role model than Mrs. Bush who had dropped out of college. In this example, she used Alice Walker’s novel “The Color Purple” and how traits such as individuality and finding yourself resonated throughout the graduating body before her. This helped her gain credibility by displaying her understanding of the situation and the skills that made her a candidate to speak. This example also appealed to the audience by adding humor to her message while also bringing each student to the realization that a turning point in their lives had …show more content…
Barbara Bush crafted a speech structure that perfectly fit the occasion after rejecting the idea of using a pre-used speech. After receiving a large amount of criticism about whether Mrs. Bush was qualified enough to speak at the commencement ceremony, she began the speech by stating why she deserved the opportunity. Statements about past accomplishments and the addition of Mrs. Gorbachev to the event bolstered her credibility and quickly dismissed the issue from the minds of the audience. The next segment of the structure used humor to strengthen her points and further win over the audience. She made the ideas of her speech lighthearted and easy to comprehend which better resonated with the overly excited crowd. The final part of the speech made direct connections between Barbara and the audience as she described her life and why student need to find what makes them happy. This drove home all of her previous points in a more direct manner without losing audience appeal. Overall The entirety of the speech was very well structured and this combined with her presentation of the message heightened the