Comparing Patrick Henry's Speech To The Virginia Convention

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Politicians use many different ways to persuade the intended audience. The speech to the Berlin Wall, and the speech to the Virginia Convention were both similar in ways of impacting people and using the same form of persuasion, but different when it came to a sense of hope, time periods, and the reasoning. Reagan and Henry use different different modes of persuasion. The differences between the Berlin Wall speech and the speech to the virginia convention, are the time periods, the view of hope, and the point of views. The speech to the Virginia Convention was written by Patrick Henry in 1775. Patrick Henry was only a public speaker who was against the british government. The Berlin Wall speech was written by Ronald Reagan in 1987. He was …show more content…

They both have a strong passionate form of pathos. The speech to the Virginia Convention by Patrick Henry is most known for its last line of pathos! ¨Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!¨ (Henry, 126). He also tries to reason with all the people suffering from the british government. ¨We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament¨ (Henry, 125). Reagan uses the same form of persuasion. Reagan uses pathos to get all the sufferers to realize he knows how they feel. ¨Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same--still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state¨, (Reagan). Once he has all the people who have suffered listening to him, he uses ¨hope¨, an emotion, to persuade the audience to withstand their corrupt government. ¨Yet I do not come here to lament. For I find in Berlin a message of hope, even in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumph¨,

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