Rhetorical Analysis Of Elizabeth Glaser Speech

In her speech, Elizabeth Glaser convinces people and leaders in America that they need to acknowledge and respect the real dangers of AIDS and the victims that have it. Glaser effectively uses ethos, repetition, and tone to convey this message to the audience.
Elizabeth Glaser, the woman who brought awareness of AIDS, takes a stance based on her own experience with AIDS. In order to help the audience to believe her, at the beginning of her speech, Glaser tells the audience that she “Had unknowingly passed it to [her] daughter, Ariel, through [her] breast milk, and [her] son, Jake, in utero”. In order to build Elizabeth Glaser’s ethos, Glaser talks about how she and her children aren’t the “typical” or “expected” people to contract AIDS. She

Glaser effectively uses an urgent tone to help convey this message. When dissecting the tone of Glaser’s speech, the sections that were discussed were related to the topic of her personal life. Glaser essentially wants to evoke a sense of sympathy in her audience, which encourages them to make changes. Although they are spread throughout the speech, the main areas of discussion are the points in which Glaser talks about the effects AIDS had on her personally. Throughout her speech, Glaser creates a tone of urgency and desperation. In doing so, she elicits a feeling of sympathy in her audience. She talks about her daughter’s death and how she “did not survive the Reagan Administration” and that “this is a crisis of caring”. She goes on to say, “While they play games with numbers, people are dying”. Glaser uses the urgent tone of her personal experiences in order to get the crowd to see and acknowledge the danger of AIDS. This speech utilizes tone in a highly effective way because it invokes a feeling of sympathy in the audience. These emotions empower those in the audience to make a change and step forward into a new and changing