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A Rhetorical Analysis Of Ed Helms's Graduation Speech

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Every writer or speaker spends a lot of time prepare what they what to say and how they want to say it. It is a long process and takes a lot of time; because they need to think and re-think about the main idea and the purpose. Also they need to be awareness that it is difficult to engage people in spoken or written form. In order to communicate effectively most of them use rhetorical enhances communications and presentation skills. Rhetoric is an ancient art which started in Greece but it is still use it now day in speeches on different situations. There are excellent examples of that on graduation speeches. Ed Helms, famous actor, gave an effective speech on the Cornell class of 2014 because he knew who their audience was, he used correctly …show more content…

This speech was made for the class of 2014. By that year, Ed Helms was well known for his work on The Daily Show, The Office and The Hangover (trilogy) films. His major success it was The Hangover but in his speech he used a lot of examples of one of his character in The Office because it was someone related to Cornell University. He also was awareness that it was a graduation with a lot of young people and because he is a comedian he did a lot of jokes to try to engaged the audience with the ideas that he wanted to share with them. And finally, in his speech, he also applied pathos which is the emotional quality of the speech or text that makes it persuasive to the audience. Because he used the context, he appealed to the emotional by talking about the feeling that most of the students feels when they finally finish college, which is insecurity about what is going to be their life out of the campus. So, Ed Helms said: “Many times in life, college graduation for example, we don’t have a clear goal were overwhelmed by all the options or were scared. We don’t know enough to succeed at the thing we want, doesn’t matter be a fool and work hard at whatever is right in front of you”. He could connect with the students by talking about the feelings that everyone had in a graduation

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