Analysis of Speaker’s Ethos

Celeste Headlee impressed her audience and made them laugh by starting her speech questions about theirexperiences in unfriending people. This leaves not only a funny and approachable impression, but also shows that she knows her audience. (Unit 2 Slide ) She put efforts on connecting the audience by understanding their questions through the questions she asked and then tried to send message to them. (Unit 2 Slide )

In her rhetorical talk, the most frequent words that I noticed is “listening”. It appeared a few times when she illustrated the current situation that we lost the skills to conversate with others. This attracts the audience, because the competence to talk and listen to each other related to everybody and this skill is overlooked in the society. When Celeste Headlee pointed out this fact, the statement that “We are not listening to each other” struck the audience’s heart and stuck in their mind, which uses the technique of Pathos. (Unit 2 Slide ) Using examples about kids shows her genuinely concern with the anyone and the whole society, cause it made everyone realise that the problem affects the future. She took good care of her audience by showing her awareness and took fully control in the speech by leading her audience to think about the ideas that she was going to present. (Unit 2 Slide )

When coming to the suggestions part, she clearly identified the action, listed as a bullet point and gave examples and explanations for each point. By following this structure, the audience could grasp the essential part right in the beginning and made the explanations more convincing. The highly summarised bullet point and the concise interpretation shows that she is very knowledgeable. Additionally, referring to the famed therapist M. Scott Peck established the credibility of her talk and also shows she was fully prepared, enthusiastic and trustworthy. All of the questions that she throwed to the audience got a straightforward response in the following speech. The question sometimes pointed out the purpose directly which are logos, for example “Why do we not listen to each other?”. Throughout the whole humorous talk, Celeste Headlee was able to give an open communication successfully by building connections, getting knowledge of audience and doing extensive research.

Works Cited

1. Headlee, C. (2015, March). 10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation. [Video]. TED Talks. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/celeste_headlee_10_ways_to_have_a_better_conversation
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