What Is The Purpose Of Speech By Malala Yousafzai

The text is the speech of Malala Yousafzai which was delivered before the United Nations Youth Assembly on Malala Day. The purpose of the speech is to raise the awareness of the audience regarding the importance and necessity of education. She utilizes many powerful literary devices to gain the audience attention. The speech was intended for all the people across the globe.
Malala opens her speech by ‘In the name of God, the most beneficent, the most merciful.” To tell the audience that God is the first priority in her life and she does not use the word Allah is an Islamic-oriented word, God in the other hand is a neutral word and accepted by most of the religions. However, she does express her religion by greeting ‘Assalamu alaikum’. From the beginning and throughout her speech she addresses the audience as ‘brothers and sisters’ to give the audience the sense of kinship and ultimately representing the young.
Early on her speech, she mentions that she is wearing a shawl of the late Benazir Bhutto – the first female Pakistani leader, a hero of education and women’s right who was assassinated by terrorist. Malala is wearing a mantle of a person who had spoken in the UN and the most of the audience would have known Bhutto thus add

So here I stand, one girl, among many.” The sentence conveys the idea that she is just a small kid, alone facing the huge and cruel world. The audience may imagine their children being in Malala’s shoes or even themselves going through that harsh journey. Therefore, the audience get the deeper meaning of her speech. In the same paragraph she uses anaphora “Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated.” Anaphora is greatly known from the Martin Luther King’s repeated phrase: “I have a dream”. There is parallelism between them as both of them are enforcing human’s