How to Analyze a Speech

Rhetorical analysis — the systematic examination of how a communicative act works — is one of the most valuable intellectual skills you can develop. A well-executed rhetorical analysis of a speech doesn't just describe what was said; it explains how the speech worked, why particular choices were made, what effects those choices produced, and how the speech succeeded or failed as a persuasive act in its particular historical and social context. This guide gives you a complete, systematic framework for analyzing any speech from any era.

Step One: Establish the Rhetorical Situation

Before analyzing a single sentence, you must understand the situation that called the speech into being. Lloyd Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation identifies three components that every analysis should examine first:

Step Two: Identify the Rhetorical Genre

Aristotle's three genres — deliberative, forensic, and epideictic — provide a crucial orienting framework. Most speeches belong primarily to one genre, with elements of the others woven in:

Identifying the genre tells you what the speech is trying to accomplish and what standards of success apply. A eulogy that argues for policy change has failed its genre; a political speech that reads like a eulogy may be making a strategic choice — or a rhetorical error.

Step Three: Analyze the Three Appeals

Aristotle's three modes of proof — ethos, pathos, and logos — are the primary analytical categories for understanding how a speech makes its case. Apply each systematically:

Ethos: How the Speaker Constructs Credibility

Ethos is not just the speaker's pre-existing reputation — it is actively constructed within the speech itself through choices of language, evidence, self-presentation, and posture toward the audience. Ask:

• How does the speaker establish expertise or authority? Through credentials, experience, demonstrated knowledge?
• How does the speaker demonstrate virtue or integrity? Through acknowledged uncertainty, willingness to say difficult truths, consistency between stated values and rhetorical choices?
• How does the speaker demonstrate goodwill toward the audience? Through understanding of their situation, acknowledgment of their concerns, apparent alignment of speaker's and audience's interests?
• Are there ethos vulnerabilities — prior actions, affiliations, or positions that undermine credibility — and how does the speaker address or avoid them?

Pathos: How the Speech Engages Emotion

Emotional appeals are not manipulative departures from argument — they are legitimate means of engaging an audience's full capacity for evaluation. Ask:

• What emotions does the speech try to evoke, and are they appropriate to the situation?
• How are they evoked — through narrative, imagery, analogy, direct address, the invocation of shared values?
• Are the emotional appeals honest (genuinely engaging emotions that the evidence justifies) or manipulative (triggering emotions the evidence does not support)?
• How does the speech calibrate emotional intensity — does it build, modulate, release? Where are the emotional peaks and troughs?

Logos: The Structure of Argument

Ask:

• What is the central claim? Is it stated explicitly or implied?
• What evidence is offered — facts, statistics, examples, testimony, analogies?
• What warrants connect the evidence to the claim? Are these warrants stated or assumed? Are the assumptions the audience shares?
• Are there logical fallacies? Do they undermine the speech's credibility or do they pass unnoticed because they exploit audience assumptions?
• How does the speech handle opposing arguments — does it acknowledge and refute them, ignore them, or strawman them?

Step Four: Examine Arrangement

The structure of a speech is itself a rhetorical argument. The classical framework — exordium, narration, partition, confirmation, refutation, peroration — provides a template, but the more important questions are about the choices made within and departures from that template:

• How does the speech open? Does it establish the stakes immediately or build toward them? Does it begin with the speaker's perspective or the audience's?
• Where is the central argument placed — early, as a thesis to be supported, or late, as a conclusion to be reached? What does this sequencing imply about the audience's prior position?
• How are transitions managed? Does the speech feel like a coherent progression or a series of disconnected points?
• How does it close? Does the conclusion circle back to the opening (creating a sense of completion), extend the argument to its largest implications, or issue a direct call to action?

Step Five: Analyze Style and Language

Style analysis examines how the speech uses language — not just what it says but the specific words, sentences, rhythms, and figures through which it says it. Key areas:

Diction and Register

Is the language formal or colloquial? Technical or accessible? Latinate (formal, abstract, distanced) or Anglo-Saxon (concrete, direct, visceral)? Does the register remain consistent, or does it shift — and do those shifts serve rhetorical purposes?

Figures of Speech and Thought

The classical figures are not decorations — they are rhetorical tools. Identify the dominant figures and explain what work they are doing:

• Anaphora (repeated beginnings) creates rhythm, emphasis, and the impression of accumulated force
• Antithesis (parallel contrasts) clarifies distinctions and makes positions feel definitive
• Metaphor frames an issue by mapping it onto a domain of prior understanding, activating that domain's associations and logic
• Tricolon (groups of three) creates a sense of completeness and rhetorical inevitability
• Rhetorical questions invite the audience to supply an answer the speaker has already prepared, creating the experience of independent reasoning

Rhythm and Cadence

The music of a speech — its sentence rhythms, the length and variation of its periods, its use of parallelism and contrast — is a form of emotional argument that operates below conscious attention. Read the speech aloud and notice: where does the rhythm accelerate? Where does it slow and become solemn? These rhythmic choices map precisely onto emotional intention.

Step Six: Consider Delivery (Where Possible)

If you have access to audio or video, analyze delivery as a separate rhetorical dimension. Quintilian called delivery "the dominant factor in oratory" — the element that most directly moves audiences. Consider:

• Vocal variation: Does the speaker modulate pace, volume, and pitch expressively, or deliver in a monotone?
• Pauses: Where does the speaker pause, and for how long? Strategic silence is one of the most powerful tools in oratory.
• Physical presence: Eye contact, gesture, posture, movement — how does the speaker use the body to reinforce or undermine the verbal message?
• Authenticity: Does the delivery feel genuine, or performed? Does it match the emotional content of the language?

Step Seven: Evaluate Effectiveness

A rhetorical analysis must ultimately assess how well the speech achieved its purposes with its intended audience in its historical context. This is not the same as asking whether the speech's argument was correct — a speech can make a bad argument effectively, or a good argument badly. Ask:

• Did the speech achieve its immediate goal? What evidence do we have about audience response?
• Did it achieve its long-term goals? How did it shape subsequent events, discourse, or policy?
• What were its rhetorical strengths — what worked, and why?
• What were its weaknesses — what failed, was avoided, or misfired?
• Are there ethical concerns about its rhetorical strategies — manipulation, deception, exploitation of audience vulnerabilities?