Week Two: Rhetorical Analysis

I plan to write my rhetorical analysis on Nixon's Checkers speech. When I first read Nixon's speech, I was struck by his bravery to stand in front of the nation and share some very private details about his life. I admire that he confronted the issue and the accusations against him rather than just sweeping it under the rug. I was especially surprised when he began to lay out the financial status of his family, as that is not something that people like to share. I did not like, however, when he brought up some of the other politicians who had similar accusations brought against them. I feel that he used these other men as scapegoats to try to take some of the negative attention off of himself. To me, this seems like a somewhat tactless approach. I would like to analyze this speech further and determine what aspects of his style helped make the speech effective.

The question "What is style?" immediately made me think of a writer's voice. I like to equate the words style and voice. In my own writing, I prefer my style to reflect the way I actually speak. Often when I write papers or essays, I speak many sentences out loud to make sure that they flow and that my voice comes through in the writing. I have found that this is also a very effective way to proofread. The style reading we did for Wednesday's class placed so much emphasis on figures of speech in writing, but I believe that style encompasses everything about a piece of prose: language, sentence and paragraph structure, and the overall flow of ideas. Ultimately, I think a writer needs to be comfortable with the mechanisms they employ in their writing otherwise their work will sound awkward and insincere. Style is understanding what makes your own writing effective, not just compiling ten different kinds of figures of speech in each paragraph.