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Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech By Elie Wiesel

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Building Up The Main Point Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech shows and involves many gratitudes towards the people in his life. He, being a proud Jew, receives this award because he has continued to show peace, and believe in peace, after the fact that he was humiliated during the Holocaust. His speech includes the struggles he faced throughout his life and how grateful he is for the honor of accepting the Nobel Peace Prize; although, he believes he does not deserve it. Throughout the speech he adds many rhetorical devices that build on and add to the main point. He also chooses a specific text structure, and word choices, that make the conclusion of the speech more dramatic and effective. ¨Keep Memory Alive¨ by Elie Wiesel features many different rhetorical devices. Each one specifically adds to the conclusion that “neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim¨ and ¨silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented¨ (Wiesel 10). For example, he states ¨And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep …show more content…

He uses this to grab the attention of the audience by telling a problem, but continuing it with the solution. This adds anxiety, or anxiousness, in the speech. It also makes the audience feel powerful, and inspires them to make a change by showing that they actually can. Likewise, Wiesel says ¨And then I explained to them how naive we were, that the world did know [about the multiple problems] and remained silent.¨ This specifically hit the audience hard, by pointing out where they messed up, but also showing that from that point on they could all change this by speaking up when they would usually stay silent. In context with this, the word choices Elie Wiesel uses makes the speech more understandable to to the listeners. Even though he makes the text simpler, it takes no value away from the words he is using. He is still able to get his point across clearly and

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