Response to Laura Bush's campaigning speech and the Bitzer and Intro readings

This week’s readings were definitely a bit easier for me to comprehend. The first reading, “An Introduction to Rhetoric” was exactly what the title suggests, an introduction to the art of rhetoric. It showed the evolution of rhetoric starting from the time around the fifth century with the sophists, the teachers of wisdom and rhetoric, and the Greeks who distrusted them. We are taken through the Middle Ages, when rhetoric was beginning to be incorporated into preaching and was thought to exist in the writing of letters and also in education. The Enlightenment was a time that preferred and focused on science rather than rhetoric. The Modern Period held three trends: the epistemological, belletristic, and elocutionist. The end of the reading took us through a tour of what was coming up in the book and explained the reasoning for the choices of selections to be included in the book.

The second reading, “The Rhetorical Situation” was a bit easier to apply to the outside speech I chose to critique, a campaigning speech, written by Laura Bush, in September of 2004. According the Bitzer, discourse is created because of the situation. This accurately applies to Laura Bush’s speech, which was created for the purpose of the upcoming election. This is also an example of kairos, where Bush times the speech to occur close enough to the election that the audience will be affected and vote accordingly. Her telos, as a result of producing a speech at this time is to influence the audience enough to vote for her husband so that he may win the election. Bitzer mentions that there are three constituents of a rhetorical situation. They are exigence, audience, and constraints. Bitzer quotes, “An exigence is rhetorical when it is capable of positive modification and when positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse”(221). In the case of Bush’s speech, the election and the need for a new president would be the exigence. The speech made by Bush is the discourse that is helping to positively change the outcome of the election. The rhetorical audience is supposed to be “capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (221). The audience of Bush’s speech was certainly rhetorical because they were all capable of being persuaded by the speech and capable of being able to change the outcome of the election. Constraints of the rhetorical situation involve the “beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, motives,” ect…(222). They all have “the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (222). The beliefs and attitudes that the audience bring with them to hear the speech will possibly constrain them from modifying the situation (or in this case, voting for President Bush again).

In terms of ethos, logos, and pathos, I think Laura Bush does an excellent job of establishing all three throughout her speech. Ethos is created specifically well in places of the speech where she refers to her family and creates the image of them as being “normal”. She dedicates a paragraph to tell of the changes her own family is experiencing during this time of the elections, noting the loss of the family dog, the daughters’ career moves, and the moving of her mother to a retirement home. Because we hear what the family is experiencing in everyday life, we are better able to connect with them and trust in them to make decisions that concern the life of the common man. Her use of logos is especially effective because she is trying to convince the audience of all that her husband has contributed to the US over the past four years. She makes comments on acts that were created such as “No Child Left Behind” and talks about the contributions her husband has made in the funding of stem cell research. The most effective example of logos in my opinion is the paragraph that talks of how President Lincoln and Roosevelt didn’t want to go to war, but they knew they had to. These past examples help to support her husband’s decision to go to war. She uses pathos effectively with her example of her generation hiding under desks during the Cold War. She uses this terrifying memory to show how America has changed, and with the leadership of her husband, the children will no longer be hiding under desks, afraid of terror alerts. The category of the speech is primarily epideictic, mainly because Laura Bush is praising her husband’s actions and contributions to the US over the past four years. I found this speech at the website:

www.command-post.org/2004/2_archives/014851.html.