Rhetorical Critique

For my Rhetorical Critique Essay, I decided to critique the speech by UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, Emma Watson, which she gave to United Nations Headquarters in 2014. The main purpose of this speech was to explain a new campaign for gender equality called “HeForShe”. In the speech Ms. Watson says uses personal stories, facts, and appeals to emotion. The thesis of this speech is that gender equality is everyone’s concern; that being feminist not something that means “man-hating (Watson),” but rather a term that simply implies the fact that a person believes that men and women should be treated equally. She makes this speech different from all the other speeches on gender equality by trying to appeal to her male audience the most. This worked

However, it was not a typical problem-solution because it went solution-problem-problem versus problem-solution. This was a particularly conversational speech; all the points flowed directly into the next one. Her opening sentence, “Today we are launching a campaign called “HeForShe” (Watson), is a straightforward attention grabber, and it tells you what the speech is about, the “HeForShe” campaign. She then explains what she hopes to achieve with her speech and more importantly the campaign, “We want to end gender inequality—and to do that we need everyone to be involved. (Watson).” Later in the speech she uses personal stories about how feminism and gender equality have personally affected her. She then follows those points closely with facts about how gender equality has affected both genders. I found this organizational pattern to be effective because it gave the speech a natural feel and demanded attention from the audience’s emotions, thus appealing to their sense of

While many of the points in this essay overlapped with mine, such as how she places emphasis on the male involvement of the gender equality movement, there was one main difference between this analysis and my own. It was something I completely overlooked; the fact that Mrs. Watson did not provide any counter-arguments. This is important because it gives you the chance to respond to any objections before the audience gets a chance to think of them. It also shows that the speaker is a reasonable person who has considered both sides of the debate, thus making the speech more