Rhetorical Situation unit test

Exigence

Tone

Primary vs secondary audience

Occasion vs exigence

Hostile, neutral and friendly audiences

Context

Audience

Rhetorical triangle

Pathos beyond emotion words

Kairos

Persona vs speaker

Context beyond date

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS (6 points). On July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass — who had escaped from slavery fourteen years earlier and had become the most prominent Black orator in the United States — was invited by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society to deliver an Independence Day address at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. His audience was largely white, largely sympathetic to reform, and had gathered to celebrate the nation's founding. The speech, described in our own words (read the full text, which is in the public domain and widely available): Douglass opens with elaborate modesty, calling himself unaccustomed to public speaking and expressing trepidation at addressing so distinguished an audience. He then turns to the Revolution, praising the founders at length and in warm terms — their courage, their willingness to be called agitators and traitors, their insistence that a government must rest on the consent of the governed. He dwells on this at length, allowing his listeners to settle comfortably into the celebration they came for, and repeatedly uses the pronoun "your" for the fathers, the nation, and the holiday. Roughly halfway through, he pivots. He asks what the Fourth of July means to the American slave, and answers that the celebration reveals to that person, more than any other day of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. The tone shifts from ceremonial to accusatory, and the sentences shorten and accumulate into cataloguing lists. He refuses to argue that the enslaved are men, observing that the statute books already treat them as men by punishing them as men, and asks whether he is expected to prove by argument that the wrong is wrong. He declares that what is needed is not light but fire, not gentle showers but thunder. He turns then to the churches and to the clergy who defend slavery from Scripture, and to the Fugitive Slave Act, and to a nation that shelters foreign revolutionaries while holding three million people in bondage. He closes, however, not in despair but in hope, arguing that the forces of the age — the spread of ideas, the shrinking of distance by steam and telegraph, the impossibility of confining knowledge — make slavery's continuation untenable, and he quotes the Declaration's own principles back to the nation as the ground of that hope. Write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Douglass makes to convey his message to this audience on this occasion.