Rhetorical Analysis Of 'Address To The Plenary Session'

Subjected by different contexts, composers will always attain a distinctiveness in their voice, utilizing powerful mediums to present their timeless and universal discontents with society through exploration of the human experience. Such distinctive voices can achieve a didactic and engaging purpose evoking and instilling an emotional response with their audience as they begin to experience and understand the contexts and events behind its composition. Severn Cullis-Suzuki’s 1992 speech, Address to the Plenary Session, exhibits such a concept concerning the deterioration of once wondrous landscapes, invigorated by her distinguishing premature voice. In reverse Indira Gandhi’s, 1980 speech, The True Liberation of Women reflects a more articulate
As well as the differing contexts behind such voices, the distinction of voices can also arise when they shock and evoke genuine emotions within their responders through its content and structure. Suzuki’s speech Address to the Plenary Session, captures such a singular moment in time raising awareness of the rising effects of industrialization and decay of landscapes. She reminds her audience of her vulnerability and voice with continual accumulation of “I’m only a child” whilst generating a gap between her audience throughout with “us” and “we”. The personal reflective anecdote on how she “used to go fishing in Vancouver”, further conveys this youthful voice whilst reinforcing the concerns on the deterioration of the natural world. Suzuki through evocative language influences her audience to reassess their own personal context. The powerful imagery achieves this, through the synecdoche of “the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies”. Suzuki’s vivid re-envisioning of her naïve and wondrous childhood experiences and stereotypical diction of “birds” and
Yet, in similar subject matter to Suzuki, Gandhi presents a need for change, exercising ideas of social equality, the environment and unity. She elevates her audience to go beyond limitations of male superiority, persuading her audience to make change, allowing Gandhi’s voice to come through as empowering. Being cultivated in a political context whilst being the prime minister, she expresses a sense of patriotism, acknowledging “friends of India” personifying India into having “the quality of India herself”. She makes her purpose clear by the accumulative listing of “inequality and injustice between the affluent and developing countries…the need to protect this our only Earth, from rapacity and exploitation… of ancient truths regarding our own utter dependence on the balance of nature and its resources.”. Gandhi makes light of these issues with frequent use of emotive language to convey her awareness and create emotional rapport with her audience, engaging them into a different insight of the world. Most significantly, she cites other works to prove that women a part of the “underprivileged” quoted in “Man as leader, women as follower; man, as producer, women as consumer”, revealing the inferior roles imposed on men.