Rhetorical Analysis Of Kelly Mcgonigal's Speech

In the year 2013, Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford health psychologist and a bestselling author, gave a speech on stress in Edinburgh, Scotland. The audience spans from teens in the early years of high school to middle aged adults living a simple life to grandparents having health problems. McGonigal’s goal in her presentation is to persuade the audience. She wants the audience to think of stress as your friend instead of your enemy. She wants to convince them that stress is only harmful if they think it’s harmful. She wishes that all people view stress as a sign from their body helping them rise to the challenge.
McGonigal’s speech contains numerous examples of ethos, logos, and pathos. The ethos given to her is great. She has a high position, being a health psychologist, and she also dressed professionally which only adds to her credibility. However, her logos were also utilized to there maximum potential. The logos in McGonigal’s speech aided her in persuading the audience by employing countless hard facts and statistics from various sources. One of the many realities she used was a statistic involving thirty thousand adults. This study tracked the adults for eight years and the results were astounding. The researchers estimated that one hundred eighty-two thousand Americans died prematurely. Yet they did not die because of stress, they died …show more content…
She maintains eye contact with each section of the audience. Even though she has a microphone, she still projects her voice. She also used non-verbal behaviors such as hand gestures to complement her speech and even replace parts of her speech just by her actions. An example of this is when she demonstrates a demoralizing experimenter. It would be possible for me to use most of her strategies, besides the memorized speech part. I might only have to adapt to the audience involvement during my speech. I will have to find ways to relate the topic to the