Rhetorical Analysis on a speech - Essay Example

During the federal election in November, Anthony was able to convince the election staff in Rochester, New York to let her and a number of her female friends to register so that they can participate in the electoral exercise. The premise of their argument is that their group of women wanted to claim their right in the said election because it is expressed in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, which supposedly takes precedence over the statute barring women to vote under the Constitution of New York.

Four days after she casted her vote, Anthony was incarcerated and let out only after paying $1000 bail. And so triggered the important oratorical piece, “Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?”, she would deliver that would contribute its part to the women’s suffrage movement then and later on. The Rhetoric The speech, as previously stated, is an excellent rhetorical piece. It can be classified as such because it was very successful in impressing its audience by appealing to emotions, effectively driving them to action, to take the side of the speaker or change point of views.

These are made more significant by the fact that the speech is a composed of a meager 538 words. Anthony took the podium, defending her actions during the elections, stressing that what she did is an assertion of her rights, which should be equal to any of the American citizens regardless of sex and ethnicity. She explained her position eloquently, citing the laws of men and the natural law, craftily steering the discourse on the issue of personhood – of whether women are persons as well. The idea is quite clever since the suggestion of the opposite would make women not persons, effectively relegating the side she was criticizing as unjust, to the point of barbarism so as to consider the female sex incomplete or not entirely human.

To demonstrate the efficacy of the persuasive capability of the speech, I would outline three important elements present in Anthony’s persuasive speech – loosely based on the Aristotelian conception of what makes an effective rhetoric. First point is the fact that Anthony’s speech presented strong arguments. As with any form of persuasive text, it has sufficiently outlined several facts and verifiable information that supported each points made. For example, Anthony claimed that the right to vote is applicable to women as much as it covers men.

She used excerpts from the American Constitution – a very credible resource that rightfully superseded all legal documents in the US. She was emphatic about the “we” and “citizen” words as expressed in the preamble of the Constitution as well as the in opinions of the legal luminaries of her time such as Webster, Worcester and Bouvier. Anthony was able to effectively draft a logical and natural argumentation as if women-voting is the most natural thing in the world and that to deny them such opportunity is like an aberration that could offend the lord Almighty, himself.

Anthony, ended her speech with a question: whether women are persons, too. The answer is her most powerful argument, banking on the commonsensical answer that they are, indeed. And so what is the specific reason why women are to be denied the right of other persons –