I mentioned briefly in my article The Purpose of Writing that people should become familiar with the rhetoric used by politicians and news sources as a defense mechanism. The logic was that if people were able to clearly identify the ways in in which speakers try to sway them, the people would be more critical instead of passive about what they are told. The first way we can analyze this, and probably the easiest way, is to look at your average politician.
For this I’ll take a speech Hillary Clinton made about economic change. I’m only going to do the first ten minutes since the entire thing is nearly an hour, so to follow along you can either watch the first ten minutes and then read the analysis or you can follow along by the time markers I provide.
So following the basic structure of a speech, the first few…
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