Rhetorical Analysis Of Jk Rowling's Commencement Speech

J.K. Rowling’s commencement speech conveys the good in failure, while also telling the importance of imagination through informing the graduates of her own personal experiences and explaining how both can make a positive impact in a person. Rowling relates her fear of failure, and her parents fear of her living in poverty. Both factors tie together. She then goes on to tell how she did end up failing. This helps the audience to realize failure is okay because someone with as much success as her was not always successful. She conveys how failure is a part of life, and the only way someone will not experience failure is if they are living their lives in complete fear. She is using ethos here, she is someone that many people look up to. A figure to people, and showing
She explains how imagination helps us to empathy for situations other have experienced, even though we personally have not experienced them. She gets this across well by using ethos. She tells a story of a man whose mother is killed because he spoke against his own country. This makes us feel empathy for this man, therefore getting her point across. Our imagination helps us to feel pain for this man. Even though this situation has no personal impact or relation to us, we still feel compassion for this man. She began by telling us characteristics of this man, that not only helped us to make a connection with him, but also made us feel hopeful for him. The man seemed to be a very gentle and sweet man, which made us, the listeners hope nothing bad would happen to him. The descriptive words of the mans horrible screams makes the audience feel even more sadness for him,