Rhetorical Analysis Of Sojourner Truth's Speech

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In Truth’s speech, she reflects upon the inequalities among women and blacks. She describes herself as a victim that was discriminated based on her color and gender. In order to deliver her message, she uses three main forms of rhetorical appeals. These three forms of rhetorical appeals include; ethos, pathos, and logos. Sojourner Truth uses these appeals to showcase her personal experiences to gain an emotional response from the audience. She also uses repeated phrases and questions to prove the oppositions in discrimination. Ethos is used to allow for the audience to understand the author’s credibility and authority. Truth uses this ethos by referring “white women” as her audience to gain authority. For example, she states “twixt the negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men …show more content…
Truth incorporates pathos by stating “I could work as much and eat as much as a man- when I could get it- and bear the lash as well!” This quote can provide fear to the white women because she expresses how even though she was a woman, she could still provide the same way as men. This could allow for the audience (white women) to imagine how they would feel if they were in her position as a black slave. Truth had wondered why she had received the different treatments based on her color and gender; if she could still do the same as everyone else. It was a discriminatory factor to prevent blacks from having the “hierarchy” of the whites. Also, Truth states “that man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best places everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” By using pathos within this statement, Truth can create a sense of emotion of what a “black woman” went through during the periods of
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Rhetorical Analysis Of Sojourner Truth's Speech

Sojourner Truth's original speech about women’s rights and Gage’s revision of the speech both speak toward the same cause. But, they are both different in the way they are written, and with use of rhetorical appeals. One of the two, based on the time and place they were delivered, was more powerful than the other in use of those rhetorical. This is the revised version of the speech written by Mrs. Gage One reason to support this would be her use of pathos. Truth’s original version used much more…

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