Part 1
Select an excerpt from a speech on the "Great Speeches" website and commit it to memory. Record yourself performing the excerpt, upload the performance to Youtube and post the link in the submission box below.
Obviously, you are performing this excerpt from the comfort of your own home, which means I can't be absolutely sure you've committed the whole thing to memory. That's alright. If you'd like, you may use note cards or a teleprompter (if you have one?), but do not just read. In fact, if you are reading - even just notes - you need to disguise this fact. Your delivery needs to sound natural. You are performing - not simply reciting and not reading. That means dress up a little (as in, please don't just wear your sweats for this), find an appropriately dignified spot in your house, and put a little energy into it.
PS - The list I've provided, "35 Greatest Speeches in History," is rather sexist. It doesn't include a single speech by a woman, so take the "greatest" claim with a huge grain of salt. That said, the site is called "Art of Manliness," so I guess the omission of women isn't all that surprising, and to be fair, the list does include some wonderful speeches.
Part 2
Write a rhetorical analysis of the speech you recited (min. 500 words). You may use first person and maintain a fairly informal tone, but you must talk about how the speaker uses rhetorical strategies and devices in order to persuade his audience. See my own example. You can find it on my blog: "We Shall Never Surrender.")
Post the rhetorical analysis on your blog, along with a link to the recording of your speech on YouTube.
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Here's my attempt:
Winston Churchill's "We Shall Never Surrender" Speech
June 4, 1940; House of Commons; London
Of all the speeches, why would I be so foolish as to try to do justice to this one? Churchill's speech before the House of Commons is one of the most iconic of the twentieth century. And it received a boost (even though it didn't need one) from Gary Oldman's delivery of it in the final scene of Darkest Hour, the 2016 film that won him an Oscar.
To be clear, I don't have an acting background, or the requisite English accent needed to really pull this off. But I've always want to see what it was like to deliver such an inspiring speech, in the way that someone playing Guitar Hero wants to know what it's like to play the solo to "Free Bird" in front of a packed house. Besides, it seems like such an apt speech for this moment, when we could all use a bit of inspiration. Churchill spoke these words to parliament in the face of the Blitz. It's risky to try to compare his situation to ours, but in the sense that it has brought the people together to take action for the common good, the Coronavirus might be the closest thing to the Blitz in my lifetime.
Churchill has always been respected as a great orator, and with good reason, but we ought to appreciate him for his writing as well. He was a lover of poetry, and quite literally a poet himself. (His daughter helped to collect and anthologize his original works after his death.)
With its appeals to his audience's and his shared British-ness, the speech primarily deal in ethos. By calling Britain "our island home," he galvanizes his people, who are famously proud of their geographical and cultural isolation from the rest of Europe. (The phrase may also serve as a subtle allusion to John of Gaunt's famous monologue in Richard II, which calls England "this sceptred isle.") The frequency of the word "we" - it appears a whopping thirteen times in this excerpt of just over three hundred words - only serves to reinforce a shared sense of purpose.
As verbose and poetic as he can be, Churchill clearly knows the value of a good sound bite. Long sentences are punctuated with short and powerful declarative clauses: "At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do" and "[W]e shall never surrender." Of course, the most famous part of this speech is its climactic list. The anaphora of the repeated phrase "we shall" (often, "we shall fight") works as a mantra, reminding the British of their patriotic commitment. And by calling out groups of British, who will serve their country in different ways and in different places (beaches, streets, landing grounds, fields, hills) he embraces his entire audience, and demonstrates that he values their work in all of its various forms.
The excerpt ends with strong couples of words ("subjugated and starving," "armed and guarded," "power and might," "the rescue and liberation"). The individual words in these pairs lean on each other for strength, and ultimately create an effect beautiful in its poetry and firm in its purpose.
