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The Conversation Of Kindness In George Saunders Commencement Speech

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Kindness is the act of going out of your way to be kind or nice to someone or showing a person that you care. At the same time, it’s not just about being nice to someone, but also about showing sympathy and understanding. For many people, acts of kindness are done without expecting anything in return. Kindness is, unfortunately, something that you don’t see that often anymore. This makes it important that we remind each other, and ourselves, that we should be kind to one another. A simple act, such as smiling to someone who looks upset or sad, or saying hello to a stranger or maybe even starting a small conversation with the person behind you in the supermarket can make a bigger difference than expected. Kindness is the main theme in George Saunders’ commencement address from Syracuse University, May 2013. The secondary audience are the people reading the New York Times Website, where the speech was published sometime after the graduation ceremony. The readers of The New York Times are middle to upper-middle class people, who are usually well educated. However, the Primary audience are the students attending their graduation. The primary audience are more easily affected by his language, as he has chosen to use more informal language, where he uses …show more content…

He is also using pathos, when he talks about the different stories, including Ellen being bullied. Even though there is a great amount of pathos, especially as the commencement address is about life, love and the future, the main mode of persuasion is ethos. He is a professor at the university and he is being very open with his own failures by telling these personal stories, which is making the audience respect him. Simultaneously, he also uses the sponsorship effect as he mentions Shakespeare, Gandhi, Mother Teresa and Hayden Carruth, who is a graduate from Syracuse, to strengthen his

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