“Why We Must Stop Dancing to the Sound of our Own Oppression”

By Madame Gandhi

Rhetorical Analysis

Directions: In this assignment, we are looking for you to identify the rhetorical strategies used by the speaker in the video. You will fill in at least two strategies in each category, describe how the strategy is used, and detail why the speaker would employ such a strategy.

Example: (Ethos) Gandhi immediately uses high level vocabulary (academic language). This language establishes her as a credible speaker with a strong academic background. It conditions the audience to trust her larger claims that she makes deeper in the speech.

Logos:

Strategy: Research study of 2.6% identify as a women (no citation)

How/Why It’s Used: Used to show that women are being oppressed and to show not many people in the music industry are women.

Strategy: She calls out the problem of oppressing lyrics and then plays a song that is the opposite of the problem.

How/Why It’s Used: She does this to organize her speech and make it flow to help move her point across.

Ethos:

Strategy: When she said she also makes music

How/Why It’s Used: Used to show that she has credibility in the music industry as she is an artist and musician herself.

Strategy: Her song that she performed a little of

How/Why It’s Used: Has the credibility of what she’s talking about because she made a song to prove so.

Pathos:

Strategy: Passionate hand motions and volume and tone of her voice

How/Why It’s Used: To show her passion about the topic and express her emotions.

Strategy: The word choice that she uses is very specific

How/Why It’s Used: The word choice she uses about the pronouns shows how passionate she is about it and appeals to people’s emotions.

Closing Questions:

  1. Who is Gandhi’s audience? How did you decide on that audience? Name specific moments in her talk that indicate her audience.

Gandhi’s audience is people who listen to modern music. I decided this to be her audience because she calls out modern music and says that the lyrics are oppressive and there should be a change. She brings up when she works out the music she listens to that hypes her up, but when she actually looked at the lyrics, she realized that the lyrics are oppressing. This made her want to make upbeat music to hype one up, while having the lyrics be in a positive manner.

  1. Suggest two additional strategies that you feel Gandhi should or could have included in her speech to make it stronger.

  • Examples of the negative lyrics that she says is oppressing to others

  • Give other examples of people who use uplifting lyrics in order to promote those types of artists who made the change like she did

  1. Why would the strategies you suggest above improve the quality of her presentation? When describing the value of each strategy, make specific connections to how these strategies may help her speech as a whole.

The strategy of using examples of negative lyrics would help improve her argument and presentation because she can show her audience what lyrics are actually being said to further prove her point. This can be incorporated after she was talking about her workout experience that she listened to music with oppressing lyrics. Giving other examples of people with uplifting lyrics can help promote others who are fighting against the same cause as her. This will allow many people to expand their music horizon of positive lyrics. She could put this after the sample of her song so that people can see other options of music with similar lyrics and meaning as hers.