Rhetorical Devices In Tom Brokaw Speech

As Tom Brokaw Looks Back and Looks Ahead There are far better things ahead than any we have leave behind. Thomas John “Tom” Brokaw is a popular American journalist and author. The quote by C. S. Lewis symbolizes the idea of Tom Brokaw on how he sees the future approaching from the intricate incidents from the past to a new better beginning with the modern technology. He gave a speech on the triumphs and turmoil of the twentieth century like the devastating World War II and Great Depression to his audience the graduates of the well-known Stanford University in 2006. He gave the speech to the graduating class. This purpose of the speech is to let the students be responsible for their duty to help their society by using their chosen profession and to avoid to spending time on the Internet to engage with the world. Brokaw looked into the challenges and possibilities for communication, information retrieval, marketing and proselytizing. In his speech, he applies apostrophe, euphemism, connotation, anaphora, simile and appositive. He used these rhetorical devices in order to inform the audience of the positive and negative circumstances during the twentieth century like World War II and the Great Depression, but he mentions …show more content…
Appositive is a form of rhetorical device with a noun or pronoun followed by another noun and pronoun that renames or identifies it. Based on Brokaw’s speech, “Francis Fukuyama, the provocative student of social and historical trends, has given voice to concerns of many, most recently in a long article in The Atlantic Monthly” (441). As shown from Brokaw’s speech, Francis Fukuyama is a person followed by another description and describing “provocative student” and defined who he is. Brokaw use appositive approach to introduce Francis Fukuyama when he ask, “Did we win the war?” Fukuyama knows what happened due to his acquired knowledge on social and historical