Helen Keller Rhetorical Analysis

Keller was born with the ability to see and hear but proceeded to lose both senses after contracting an unknown illness early on in childhood. Unable to see or hear the world, Keller became spirited and slightly out of control. With the assistance of a governess, Keller was able to learn to sign and communicate with others. This process took time and over the course of several years, she overcame her disability. Keller learned to recognize vibration patterns to determine who was walking towards her and determine gender based on strength and body shape. She became the first blind and deaf person to obtain their bachelor’s degree and was very politically active. She gave motivational speeches and is the most well known deaf and blind person to this day. Even though Keller was not able to see or hear almost all of her life, she broke barriers and inspired thousands. Keller is a prime example of how dealing with challenges does not weaken one’s self, but allow them to

Throughout the book, DeClements portrays the main character, Helen, as the class clown resulting from her escape from reading due to her reading difficulties. Although, the school’s administration and current and past teachers have suggested evaluations for Helen’s reading difficulties, Helen’s mother insists on teaching Helen herself opposed to a special education class. Unfortunately, the assistance from Helen’s mother has not improved Helen’s reading or grades. While DeClements demonstrates Helen’s mother as the dominant figure of the family and against special education for Helen due to her above-average intelligence, Helen’s father is portrayed in a passive manner. Therefore he acquiesces to his

In 1905, a United States social reformer named Florence Kelley fought for child labor laws and improved working conditions for women. In July 1095, Kelley delivered a speech on child labor (and other topics) while in Philadelphia as a part of the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention. Within the speech, Kelley uses many notable rhetorical devices, which will be analyzed in this essay.

In America’s history, child labor was fiercely criticized. Many activists of child labor laws and women’s suffrage strived to introduce their own viewpoints to the country. Florence Kelley was a reformer who successfully changed the mindset of many Americans through her powerful and persuading arguments. Florence Kelley’s carefully crafted rhetoric strategies such as pathos, repetition, and sarcasm generates an effective and thought provoking tone that was in favor of women’s suffrage and child labor laws.

In her speech, written to persuade her audience to help put an end to child labor, Florence Kelley employs many rhetorical devices. America in 1905, we learned, was riddled with inadequate labor laws, as well as working conditions. In order to convey her message, that these unethical statues need to be amended, Kelley uses rhetorical strategies such as pathos, parallelism, and illustration.

In Florence Kelley’s heart wrenching call for awareness of child labor she uses quite a few rhetorical devices. An anaphora is the most recognizable as she’s trying to nail in how she would could be helping the children. Pathos is another of her persuasion methods used in her tone. Kelley also uses a fair amount of imagery throughout the passage.

“Abigail Williams, seventeen... a strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling.” (9) Dissembling. To conceal one's true motives, feelings, or beliefs. Ms. Williams keeps up her act of hindering the town’s social and political life with the use of false rumors and excessive lying. Ms. Abigail does not make a good impression on the reader as they find her immediately start lying. She, according to her religion and her towns customs, has broken the law. Abigail told the judge at court, after her uncle accused her of dancing in the woods as they danced naked, that none of the sort happened, but then changed her answer stating that “it were sport” (11) and it did not matter what they were doing. Then she had to take it a step further by adding that Tituba was associated with witchcraft. Abigail was the reason of the death of nineteen people, not to mention all of the people she had sent to prison. Abigail was in fact much of

Finding the fact that children from the age of “twelve to twenty years” are subject to labor heartbreaking. Florence Kelley’s speech, given at the National American Woman Suffrage Association, uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to turn the hearts of the audience against child labor, along with strengthening the argument for women’s suffrage. She does this to ultimately to argue that when women can vote, they will put a stop to child labor.

Hellen Keller once said that, “Although the worlds is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” In Hellen Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, she wrote about her experiences with learning as a person who was both blind and deaf. In this passage taken from her book, she described her transformation from a child who fought fervently against learning, to an individual who yearned to understand and describe the world around her. Keller presented her shift in the passaged as one that altered her perspective of every aspect of her life, and awakened a sense of happiness and fulfillment within her. She portrayed this change through devices that allowed the reader to closely follow her experiences and understand the emotions that she carried with her

In July of 1988, Dorothy Ann Willis Richards, the Texas State Treasurer at the time, gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, Georgia. The room was filled with democratic supporters to whom Richards emphasizes the need to for American politics to "do better." Her speech was intended to persuade the audience to vote for the Democratic party in the upcoming election, rather than the Republican party. Richards attempts to persuade the audience through her use of humor, repetition, and personal anecdotes.

America, the land of the free and the home of the brave. This phrase is sung with pride and passion by American citizens. However, some of America’s hardest working citizens are shackled down by a factor that they have no control over. Poverty, is what’s keeping citizens imprisoned while they should be living free. An appalling 44 percent of homeless Americans are employed (http://nationalhomeless.org/). Why should people who go to work and hold a job be subjected to homelessness in the greatest country in the world? Many other middle-class Americans are too shielded by their almost perfect lives to even see this. Many of them even have the audacity to say that homeless individuals or the lower-class is just lazy. Barbara Ehrenreich directly

The excerpt taken from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring leaves a lasting impression on the importance of the environment and how humans have killed hundreds of thousands birds and insects due to the usage of pesticides. She uses rhetorical strategies such as diction and tone to convey what she sees as the destruction of the ecosystem.

Catherine Saint Louis is a writer who is constantly writing about issues in health. This article is titled Pregnant Women Turn to Marijuana, Perhaps Harming Infants, published on February 2, 2017. It tells a story about a young women named Stacey who is smoking marijuana while pregnant. Catherine’s purpose in this article is to spread awareness to the world bringing the dramatic issue of destroying infants little by little that have not yet been born. This is a big issue and women don’t seem to understand it.

In the first chapter Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your AMerican History Textbook Got Wrong, James Loewen explores the common process of heroification within America’s history. The flaws of many individuals, specifically Woodrow Wilson and Helen Keller in this chapter, are usually overlooked when recounting their achievements. Loewen points outs that when heroes are recognized for certain things it only covers a short person of the person’s life. The media and schools filter out the bad to leave room for inspiration and good.

3. Eventually, Keller used her time to travel the world for the American Foundation for the Blind to raise awareness and funds for those who are needy, blind and deaf.