Analyzing Winston Churchill's Speech 'The Lights Are Going Out'

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Critical Evaluation- “The Lights Are Going Out” Speech “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm”- Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill achieved success from failures, and he also achieved success through his speeches. His speeches are what contributed to his success during World War 2. His speeches follow the criteria of an effective speech. The criteria to critique a speech are to find the speech objectives, the audience and context of the speech, the speech content and structure, and analyzing the delivery skills and techniques. The speech objectives are to “educate, to motivate, to persuade, or to entertain” (Dlugan 1). The audience and context of a speech show “where and when the speech is being delivered” (Dlugan 1), and the features of the …show more content…

Through his speeches, he tried to persuade America to join in the fight against the growing power if Nazism. One of his speeches are “The Lights Are Going Out”. He said this speech in 1938, to the people of the United States. The purpose of his speech was to encourage the US to join forces with Britain to overtake Nazi Germany. The subject of his speech is the loss of other countries, and America joining the war, and the tone of the speech is urgency. Churchill’s word choices in his speech “The Lights Are Going Out” are effective through his use of rhetoric and vocal techniques.
Churchill effectively used rhetoric in his speech. Rhetoric is the art of effective persuasive writing and speaking. Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, created rhetoric. There are three types of rhetoric, logos, pathos, and ethos. Each type differs from the other types. Logos is a logical argument built from relevant and sufficient evidence. Logos is based on facts, statistics, and claims based off of logic. Pathos is arguments which evoke emotions in an audience. Some forms of pathos are celebrity testimonials, bandwagon, and fear mongering. All of these evoke emotions in an

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