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Taylor Swift Rhetorical Analysis Essay

1057 Words5 Pages

Mary Rankin
Professor Donaldson
English 1204
12 June 2023
Taylor Swift and Rhetoric:
An Analysis of Lyrics
With more than fifty-billion streams on Spotify (Kworb), Taylor Swift highlights her talent as an artist. One factor in her success is her rhetorical ability to persuade listeners. With numerous hit songs, she successfully uses rhetoric to convince her listeners of the difficulty of relationships and how they might relate to her. In “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” and “Illicit Affairs,” Taylor Swift invokes the appeal of pathos to demonstrate her empathy for her listeners and uses similes, metaphors, hyperboles, apostrophes, allusions, and anaphora to deliver creative stories.
In “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” from Taylor …show more content…

The lyrics symbolize how she loved her boyfriend more than he loved her. Swift provides pride in the relationship, while her boyfriend remains unwilling to. She continues to demonstrate the red flag by using apostrophe by singing to the audience, “he’s gonna say it’s love.” (Swift 2021) to directly singing to her ex-boyfriend, “...you never called it what it was…,” (Swift 2021) criticizing him out for never taking the relationship seriously and sincerely as she did. Throughout her song, Swift uses rhetorical appeals of pathos to invoke the emotions she felt through her relationship with her ex-boyfriend and allow listeners to relate to her.
In the song “Illicit Affairs” in Swift’s 2020 album Folklore, she provides listeners with a story about a passionate affair and provides evidence of the complexity of affairs through allusions, anaphora, similes, metaphors, and hyperboles. In her song, Swift sings, “Take the road less traveled” (Swift 2020), alluding to “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. By doing so, she persuades listeners that she understands that having an affair is not something everyone does. In addition, Swift provides a layer of complexity by explaining that affairs are unconventional and why secrecy

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