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Rhetorical Analysis Of Winston Churchill's We Shall Fight On The Beaches

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History recalls Winston Churchill as one of the most accomplished orators that the world has ever known. Among his immortalized speeches, “We Shall Fight on the Beaches,” stands out because of Churchill’s exceptional capacity to deploy the full extent of his rhetorical skills to impact profoundly on the perceptions of his audience. The remarkable speech was presented to the House of Commons on the 4th June 1940 at a time when Nazi Germany was on the offensive across Europe. Churchill sought to prepare his people for a possible invasion of Britain by the belligerent Nazi forces and state his earnest resolve to protect the motherland. Throughout his speech, he used pathos, logos, and ethos in a manner that accentuated the profundity of his message and awakened the British people to the need for absolute sacrifice and asked them to brace for a protracted struggle. The use of rhetorical techniques in this speech was crucial for rationalizing the need for resistance and whipping up the sensibilities of the audience towards the Prime Minister’s perspective of the impending war.
At one point of the …show more content…

Evidently, Churchill sought to influence his audience by conditioning their emotional responses to the situation and by provoking their sense of reason to the available facts regarding the impending war. Noteworthy is the fact that the first part of the speech is mainly logical in aspect whereas the second part focuses on emotional appeal. Technically, it would appear as though Churchill sought to clarify the facts of the situation by elaborately using logos before reinforcing his rational perspectives with an emotional elevation of the facts. The profundity of his impact on the audience depended on the combined effectiveness of factual representation of ideas and emotional

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