World Refugee Day Rhetorical Devices

On World Refugee Day in 2009 in Washington D.C., Angelina Jolie delivered her incredible speech on refugees to spread awareness of their horrendous conditions. To get her point across, she made great use of rhetorical devices and appealing to the audience. In Angelina Jolie’s 2009 speech for World Refugee Day, she uses rhetorical devices such as allusions, anaphora, charged words, and restatement to appeal to emotion, and devices like repetition, appositives, and restatement to appeal to reason. First of all, Jolie uses rhetorical devices to make a strong appeal to emotion throughout her essay. One of the main devices she uses is allusion. In the speech, she makes an allusion to her past trip to Tanzania, where she sees a boy who has “been

This same reaction is expected from the audience when Jolie met “an eight year old girl who had seen her family killed in front of her… grabbed her baby brother… and survived, terrified and alone for two weeks [in the jungle]”.The thought of someone that young having to go through that much and surviving through such hard times paints the picture of desperate children who need help, pulling at our heartstrings. Anaphora is also used to appeal to emotion. Jolie repeats “and” in the beginning of her sentences to emphasize how much is going on to these refugees, and how much they need to go through. Listing sentences like “And he’d not been accepted for asylum in a third. And the aid worker said they’d spent the money they could but they didn’t have any more… And I thought…” overwhelms the reader and makes the audience upset over how much they have to go through. Thirdly, charged words convey the tone and mood that Jolie is trying to create. Using words like “remarkable” and “impressive” portrays the refugees in a good light, one that makes them interesting and strong. Using the words like “great loss” and “highly vulnerable” appeals to

Firstly, she uses repetition to emphasize the point that for “years and years… 80% of refugees are hosted… in the poorest developing countries”. This repetition emphasizes how long these poor nations have been handling the great responsibility of refugees, leading readers to reason with themselves. Logically, if these poor countries can provide so much help, stronger countries like America should be able to do the same and lend a helping hand. Jolie also uses an appositive to identify Pakistan in the context she is using it. In her speech, she defines it as “a country now facing a crisis with over two million of its own people still hosting 1.7 million Afghans”. Again, this makes a strong appeal to logic and reason as it causes the audience to question why countries who need so much help have to have the burden of caring for even more poor souls. Countries like America, who can sustain our own citizens, would be a more reasonable country to host refugees. The huge numbers like “two million of its own people” and “1.7 million Afghans” show how large this issue is, and how overwhelmed these already poor countries are becoming. Lastly, Jolie uses contradictory statements/oxymorons to appeal to reason by saying that “numbers can illuminate but they can also obscure”. Using this statement, she is telling the audience that the large number of refugees in need can turn attention to this topic, but also