Extra Credit

Tanner Townsend

Comm 250

Friday June 2, 2017

Powerful Speeches

            “Powerful words can move a crowd,” this is a quote that hold a lot of meaning. Throughout time we have seen powerful leaders sway the beliefs of the audience through the phrasing and word content that most appeals to their like/ dislikes. In this class I most grasped the concept that it is the argument that can sway the thinking of the audience rather than what is being argued.

            A topic that we talked about in class was that fact that it is not what you say but how you say it. That the audience is not always swayed by the topic that is being argued but in cases the argument that they find most confirming. An example of this was what we talked about in class of the speeches that have turned history for good and bad. For instance, Hitler was creating speeches that were absolutely terrible but people were following his words and the way he talked. He built Ethos that gave him the credibility to control the minds of that many people. But on a brighter side we see how many people had switched their beliefs when Obama came into office based on his ability to speak.  

            The part that amazes me so much about this is that most humans talk on an everyday basis, other find ways to persuade people but it can be self-taught, nut there is ways to learn to manipulate your words to reach the audience in a more efficient way. I feel as if this topic in the class gave me more insight into the importance of rhetoric and how it can help u in many situations. As we go through life there will be many times where we have to speak to prove ourselves, to get a job, to plead a case, the situation in which we will speak for ourselves is infinite.

I feel as if this class taught me many things in such a short time but the one thing that I took home the most was the fact that’s words are powerful but it is the way in which you speak them is how you gain the interest of the audience in order to win them over. speaking has been a part of our history for as long as history is recorded and it is up to us to find a way to win our audience over through speech.