Rhetorical Analysis Of Winston Churchill's Speech

Ask anyone, and most children choose summer as their favorite time of year. To them, nothing beats time out of school with your family and friends hitting the beaches. But go back about 80 years from now, and the summer became trimmed not with beaches and cheer, but with uncertainty and fear. In Britain, a lonely isle in a caldron of political turmoil, one Englishman, arguably the best leader Britain had ever had, concerned himself not with popsicles and baseball, but with his country’s very existence. War boiled over in Europe in a few weeks, and Winston Churchill gave one of his most famous speeches to try to rouse his greatest ally- the United States. By analyzing and explaining the purpose and audience, subject, and voice of his speech, we will see just how desperate England had become. Summer of 1939 quickly became heated,

Many a successful wordsmith has mastered voice, Winston Churchill included. He start off his speech in a jovial way, after all, summertime has hit Britain. But Winston mainly concerns himself with the prospect of Germany hitting England, and so, as he delves deeper into his speech, his voice becomes less jovial and more ironic and grave. In his last three paragraphs, he speaks as though with a straight face, getting into the nutshell of the current events. “If Herr Hitler does not make war, there will be no war. No one else is going to make war. Britain and France are determined to shed no blood except in self-defense or in defense of their Allies…we must strive to frame some system of human relations in the future which will bring to an end this prolonged hideous uncertainty.” (Churchill, Paragraph 9; 11) So there: he has laid down the gauntlet for America. The US must come to the aid of their Allies, or only more uncertainty will abound. Using voice, a most powerful weapon, Winston Churchill successfully, eventually, helped cajole America into World War