Study Activity — Speech Analysis 💬🔎

Learn strategies to become a more persuasive and engaging speaker.

Listen to the speaking techniques used by engaging orators to help you become a more persuasive speaker.

💢 Speeches are abridged for educational purposes and narrated by an actor.

Rohald Reagan

Address on the Challenger Tragedy, January 1986.

📄 In the winter of 1986, hundreds of spectators gathered at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, to watch the space shuttle Challenger launch into its 10th mission. Millions more were tuning into the live television broadcast, including children in schools across the country. Participating in the mission was 37-year-old schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, who was about to make history as the first private citizen passenger in space. 📃

📄 But Just 73 seconds after the launch, tragedy struck when the Challenger exploded, killing all seven crew members and traumatizing the nation. The future of the United States' space program seemed grim. 📃

📄 That same evening, President Ronald Reagan was scheduled to give his annual State of the Union address. Instead, he consoled a mourning nation with what is widely regarded as one of his most powerful speeches. 📃

🎧 Listen to the strategy the speaker employs in the clip to persuade the audience. When a clip ends, read this analysis of its main technique:

1-4: Appeal to Pathos. Reagan uses somber language to express his grief and show empathy with the nation.

📝 Appeal to Pathos. Derived from ancient Greek, pathos means "experience" or "suffering". In rhetoric, an appeal to pathos is an appeal to an audience's emotions and imaginations. The aim of an appeal to pathos is to help the audience understand and share in the speaker's own viewpoint. Appeals to pathos work best when they emphasize a shared value between the speaker and the audience and when paired with logical arguments. 📝

⚠️ We'll return to this exercise to learn other speaking strategies used by this orator.