Analysis Of Senator Michael Johnston's Convocation Remarks

Senator Michael Johnston’s Convocation Remarks Teachers play a critical role in the fundamental values children develop during their years of education. Teachers serve many roles in the classroom that affect a child’s behaviour and attitude for the rest of their lives. They fulfill the main role of educating students placed in their care, but beyond that expected service teachers also mentor and nurture students, become role models and they create a warm and inviting classroom environment for the children to learn and develop their character in. Today, Michael Johnston is state senator in Colorado but prior to his duties Michael was a teacher and principal in high schools and universities in Mississippi and Colorado. Johnston has a strong

Whether he was aware of it or not, Johnston used patterns of development to write his speech. The most prominent patterns of development found in the speech were narration, definition and description. Narration describes how something happens which is usually in chronological order. In Johnston’s speech, the three refrains make up the narration of the speech. He expands on each refrain and tells the stories in chronological order making his persuasive speech easy to comprehend. Definition explains what something is and gives a precise meaning to the readers. In Johnston’s speech, there were some abstract terms that needed to be defined such as deference, perilous, suffice and convocation. Once these terms were defined it made the speech flow and much easier to understand all aspects Johnston was trying to convey. The last pattern of development found was description. Description is the use of sensory details to give a clear impression of a person, place, thing, or feeling. This can be found multiple times throughout the speech. An example is when Johnston is explaining what Raquel looked like, the girl in his first story about the “right to know”. Johnston says “she is a perfect combination of her parents: a native Spanish speaker with high cheekbones like her mom, and sunshine blonde hair and bright blue eyes from her dad.” This statement clearly put an image in my head of what Raquel looked like and allowed me to be more engaged in the story about her. The patterns of development are constantly being used in our everyday life subconsciously and they serve as strategies to compose and understand