Rhetorical Analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Rhetorical Analysis - Essay ExampleWhereas Douglass addresses the mass audience, comprising people from all walks of life, on the US independence ceremony, Langstons audience comprises of people who were mentally prep be to judge Langstons words from a legal as well as a do-gooder vantage point. Indeed Douglasss audiences were less pr ane to embrace legal argument than Langstons audiences are. Therefore these two mens rhetoric strategies are also different from each other. Necessarily Douglass has to make his speech comprehensible by making it elaborative and embellishing it with emotional tropes, whereas Langstons speech appears to be substantive and fraught with poetic imageries, rhetoric doodads, especially prepared for an audience of reasoning intellect. Before an audience which largely comprises white people, both Langston and Douglass have to associate the African American with religious, more specifically with Christian, sentiment in order to draw their sympathy. Both of t hese two speakers have done so by using the rhetoric device of metonymy. While Douglass addresses his people as the emancipated people of God (321), Langston describes the ability of the emancipated slaves to escape as something God-given powers (Langston, 1859, p 233). ... Another two mentionable metonymies physical exercised by Langston and Douglass are respectively colored people and colored brethren. Out of a number of parallelisms used in Douglasss speech a remarkable one is It Independence Day carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day (Douglass, 1852, p 321). In this sentence, Douglass describes the recalling functions of the Independence Days in a series of related infinitive phrases. But a more striking parallelism occurs in the preceding sentence Independence, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. (Douglass, 1852, p 321) In this line, he draws a parallel between the fourth July and the Passover. Similarly In Address to the Court Langston uses another parallelism to expose the invalidity of the Fugitive of Slave Law. He says, The Fugitive Slave Law under which I am arraigned is an unjust one, one made to crush the colored man, and one that outrages every feeling of Humanity, as well as every rule of Right. (Langston, 1859, p 234) In opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law, Langston is quite successful to depict the African American, as a people struggling for their liberty, through the use of another parallelism And there were others who had become freeby escapingeluding the blood-thirsty patrolsoutrunning bloodhounds and horses, swimming rivers and fording swamps, and reaching at last (Langston, 1859, p 233) Meanwhile in the same sentence, he refers to the self-contradiction of the freedom of the slave, enacted by the 13th Amendment, through the use of irony. Indeed the Fugitive Slave Law was