When I used to teach persuasive writing to high school students in the UK, I often used Junior's speeches. To flex my brain, and take a stab at rhetoric, here's a quote from his speech in January, with a little linguistic analysis afterwards, focusing on one language point specifically:
"It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world."
Rule of Three: Perhaps the origin of the maxim, "the third times the charm". In order to generate rhythm, Junior's writers here employ similar sentence structure in the first two phrases, continuing and building the primal fire imagery in the initial verb (warms/burns), then, the secondary verb and final noun alliterate (repreated intial consonant sound) strongly across the phrases (feel/fight, power/progress). Apart from these variations, the first two phrases are structured identically. The final section should be the longest and the strongest, and it is: "one/un" assonate (repeated vowel sounds), and the 'fire of freedom' alliteration is returns the audience to the initial image of 'fire'. The sentence group is topped off through the provision of a focus for the fire: "the darkest corners of our world." The contrast between the language focus on the 'light', as opposed to 'dark', creates the image of one overpowering the other.
Now, this is the kind of stuff that my students were writing, or at least what I was encouraging them to write. My idea was that once anyone sees how these pieces are structured, they can see through the rhetoric and gain an appreciation of how an audience is manipulated. The problem is that the majority of audience members, or media-sponges, have no clue as to why they're influenced by rhetoric, if they even know what it is. I chose a political example, but the next time you see an ad, especially one from a company with a decent budget, take a look at how they're influencing people.
