Rhetorical Analysis Of Speech By Peopl Wallace

The next tool Wallace employs is an informal and honest through tone diction and word choice. Wallace uses phrases like “just sucks,” “I’m gonna be pissed,” “The story [thing] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre,” and “that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer” (). Usually using language like that would tear down a person’s character and credibility instantly. However for Wallace, it is used greatly to his advantage. Many times throughout the speech he also says things like “I am not the wise old fish” and “then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable,”(). Wallace builds up his ethos through reverse psychology. By making his tone informal and almost taking himself down to their level, which could easily tear down his ethos, it builds it up because it makes him seem more human. His language is not sugar coated or overly elaborate. People do not like to be talked at by someone. …show more content…
He is able to, through it, transport his audience into his speech. He says “you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit stores confusing aisles” and “Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the…parking lot.” Suddenly, the audience has to imagine themselves in grocery store wandering all over with their crazy shopping carts and flimsy bags. They also then start to feel what Wallace wants them to feel without him having to do more than use the word “you” rather than “I” or the universal “we”. Then when he wants the audience to change the way they should feel about crowded grocery stores, it is much easier because they have already personally placed themselves into the story and cannot help feeling it the way Wallace describes it. It is a tool that truly makes the speech more personal and thus more