Rhetorical Analysis Of Oprah Winfrey

At the 2018 Golden Globes Awards, Oprah Winfrey, a former talk show host, actor, and businesswoman, received the Cecil B. DeMille Award. After being introduced by Reese Witherspoon, she acknowledged the significance of becoming the first black woman--and the 15th woman overall--to receive the award ever since it was first handed out in 1952. She delivered an invigorating, powerful, and impassioned commemorative speech that began as a personal reflection and ended as a call to arms against sexual harassment. Skillfully blending and employing appeals to pathos, parallel structure, and an encouraging, candid, and hopeful tone, Oprah Winfrey successfully inspires women to speak up against men and to resist oppression.

To amplify the message of

her speech, Winfrey appeals to the audience’s pathos primarily through her diction. In the beginning, she utilizes words such as “abuse,” “tyrants,” “victims,” “corruption,” and “injustice” to describe the current state of society and evoke an emotional response from the audience.

Due to the strong, negative connotations of such words, it may upset or perturb the audience and cause disturbing images or experiences to erupt subconsciously. This actually strengthens Oprah’s argument because by painting such a gruesome reality that causes feelings of repulse, the audience becomes more likely to accept or prescribe to her overall message and position on such topics. Furthermore, through these negative experiences, Winfrey manages to evoke feelings of connectedness to the victims of sexual harassment or oppression that make up a large portion of her audience. These listeners may feel relieved at the fact that someone understands their struggles and therefore, are more emotionally

compelled to listen and act accordingly to her message. In the latter half of her speech, she utilizes words with strong, positive connotations such as “truth,” “new,” “love,” and “persevere” to evoke a more enthusiastic response from the audience. Not only does it counter the pessimistic feelings generated in the beginning, but it leaves the listeners with a much more memorable feeling: hope. Towards the end, she predicts the dawning of a new era spurred by the #MeToo movement and develops the image of a world where “nobody ever has to say ‘Me too’ again.” This image appeals to the audience’s aspirations--the end of oppression--which provides them with an incentive to take a stance and make her prediction become a reality.
Additionally, Oprah uses parallel structure to organize and emphasize her message to women around the world: to speak the truth against men.

She expresses gratitude “to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like [her] mother, had children to feed, bills to pay, and dreams to pursue.” The similar grammatical structure of this sentence introduces balance, places an equal emphasis on all the items within the list, and clarifies ideas through repetition. In addition, it creates a steady cadence that makes the line more memorable to the audience. Oprah uses parallel structure throughout her speech, as most speechwriters do, however, she only uses parallelism when she wants to emphasize or highlight a certain set of ideas that play a pivotal role in conveying her message. Additionally, Oprah employs balance, a type of sentence that uses parallelism for both grammatical structure and meaning. For example, she claims that “[women are] our athletes in the Olympics and [women are] our soldiers in the military.” The use of balanced syntax in this sentence stresses the idea that women are universally employed, from the Olympics to the military, and that they are a prevalent figure in society. This furthers Oprah’s message and argument against sexual harassment because she indirectly stands up for these nameless women who have been oppressed and introduces the idea that women are more than their gender. To further her message of equality for women, she

uses parallel structure to show that the speaker does not value one idea more than another since each repeated structure is of equal importance.
Moreover, Oprah maintains an encouraging, candid, and hopeful tone throughout her speech that effectively conveys her speech and convinces the audience to listen. This tone establishes the atmosphere, which is the mood that the listeners should feel from the speech. Although she manipulates/changes her tone slightly by changing what she focuses on from time to time, she also maintains a general encouraging, candid, and hopeful tone in order to refrain the audience from tuning out--especially when she discusses the dark side of society. Despite the sensitivity of the subject matter, the way Oprah presents it--respectfully but insistent on change--actually convinces the listeners to take action against it and improve society. But, this particular tone shines the brightest towards the end of Oprah’s speech when she predicts that “a new day is on the horizon” for women--a time when women don’t need to say “me too” again. The combination of powerful, positive words and exclamatory sentences develops a very encouraging and hopeful tone that contributes to her purpose: the empowerment of women. She motivates and gives hope to her primarily female audience through phrases such as “brighter morning,” “new day finally dawns,” and “ability to maintain hope” to inspire them not only to change themselves, but also to change society for the welfare of women all around the world. Her candid tone, which shine through when she says that “the press is under siege these days,” actually helps her establish ethos because of how straightforward she sounds. It reveals that she has no ulterior motive and paints her as a genuinely open and sincere person, which is backed up by her history of kindness towards others. With credibility, people are more likely to prescribe to her thoughts and position on women in society as well as take action to turn her prediction into reality because they respect and trust her.