Speeches_-_Margret_Atwood,_Paul_Keating

Great speeches have a clear and focussed purpose with an understanding of the anticipated response of their audience. Great speeches have a clear and focussed purpose with an understanding of the audience’s response, while also encompassing rhetoric elements to engage, inform and evoke emotions from the audience. The effectiveness of a speech is usually a reflection of its structure or craft. Margaret Atwood’s “Spotty-handed Villainesses” and Paul Keating’s “Funeral Service Of The Unknown Australian Soldier” although structured differently, are crafted as such that their purpose is clear and focussed and they engage their audience effectively. Paul Keating’s “Funeral Service Of The Unknown Australian Soldier” was given on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1993. Not only significant as the 75th anniversary of the 1918 armistice, it was also the date of the entombment of the remains of an unknown soldier from the Western Front at an Australian War Memorial shrine in Canberra. As the speech was a eulogy and its content sensitive to thousands across Australia and the world, Keating needed to employ delicacy and tact in delivering it. He centres his speech around the themes of war, peace, patriotism and remembrance. As an official Australian representative he promotes these themes via the idea that it is the ordinary people, and in turn this Unknown Australian Soldier, that are the heroes of war. He emphasises that the lesson learned from war is “that they were not ordinary”. Keating uses various techniques to connect and engage with his audience, while still keeping a strong voice in promoting his opinion and purpose. His most frequented technique is the use of inclusive language, the use of “we”. This technique, consistent throughout the speech, unites the audience and aids Keating in his purpose of embracing Australian identity and values. The strong personal voice and compassion created helps the audience to connect with Keating and the symbolic nature of the soldier. In the first paragraph, Keating also uses the contrast of binary opposites to establish links between the Soldier. Binary opposites such as “city or the bush” and “married or single” relates the soldier to all levels of the population. He also includes women, “nurses”, in his glorification, showing even more unity. The structure of Keating’s speech also helps to create meaning and purpose. In the first paragraphs, Keating speaks of what it is we don’t know about this Soldier, using anaphora (“we do not know”) to emphasise it. However, as we move further into the speech, Keating makes it clear that it is the very lack of knowledge about this soldier that makes him such an important symbol for peace. The use of statistics and data helps add weight and credibility to this point, and the long sentences used in this paragraph are mimetic of the information given. This makes for the perfect contrast to the next sentence “He is all of them. And he is one of us”. Its power comes from its simplicity and again reinforces the Unknown Soldiers significance to all Australians. Once this is established, the rest of the speech is spent building on this notion, as well as glorifying peace over war. For example, Keating uses the combination of the emotive words “mad, brutal, awful struggle” with the device of asyndeton, the removal of conjunctions between words to emphasise the futility of war. Keating also focuses his speech on Australian values and what the Unknown Soldier represents for Australia. He states this clearly in a later paragraph, “That is surely at the heart of the ANZAC story, the Australian legend which emerged from the war…It is a legend of free and independent spirits whose discipline derived less from military formalities and customs than from the bonds of mateship and the demands of necessity”. By referring to the iconic ANZAC legend and using the Aussie slang of “mateship”, Keating strikes a patriotic chord with the audience, forging a connection between the audience, himself, and the Soldier. He goes on to summarise that through the losses of war, “we have gained a legend: a story of bravery and sacrifice and, with it, a deeper faith in ourselves and our democracy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be Australian”. Margaret Atwood is a bestselling contemporary author, poet and former university lecturer and although she does not associate herself with any specific feminist groups, has long been a strong spokesperson for women’s issues and concerns. “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” was made on various occasions throughout 1994 and once in 1993. Her audience’s consisted mainly of well-educated, largely Western, females. As an author, the focus and purpose of her speech are clearly shown throughout. She focuses mainly on the roles played by women, in particular evil women, in literature and the effects and influences of society on those roles. Similar to Keating, the effectiveness of Atwood’s speech can be attributed to her craft and rhetoric devices. Although, her structure is entirely different to Keating’s. Instead of a short and tightly constructed speech, “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” is very colloquial, with long flowing sentences and paragraphs, occasionally appearing to go off on tangents. However, on closer inspection, it can be seen that Atwood’s colloquial and personal tone cleverly disguises a very well crafted speech. This colloquial mood is set from the very first paragraph, starting with an ellipsis to indicate moving into an ongoing train of thought, and self-amendments and humour in the title. The casual feel is furthered when she recites a children’s rhyme, adding a personal anecdote to engage the audience. She then goes on to explain the significance of the rhyme, before jumping back to her title, and then deepening the purpose of her address. The “unstructured” feel of the first few paragraphs gives the impression of improvisation, but in each paragraph Atwood makes a new point and clearly communicates it to the audience. She also uses colloquial language such as “female-obilia” (an example of neologism) and “sticky ends”. As the audience is lulled into the informal tone, Atwood then attacks with a paragraph of rhetorical questions, challenging the audience, criticising feminism and pushing into controversial territory. The personal anecdote established in the sixth paragraph acts as the defining metaphor for her speech. Atwood uses it to emphasise her main points: the purpose of novels, the writing process, and why we create certain characters. Her philosophy is summed up in one line “something else has to happen…we expect something more than breakfast”. She then expands this idea to bring to the fore the role of “evil” women in literature. Rhetorical questions are used again to actively engage her audience in the argument, asking “Isn’t bad behaviour supposed to be the monopoly of men'…When bad women get into literature, what are they doing there, and are they permissible, and what, if anything, do we need them for'” This long sentence structure is mimetic of her train of thought and further exemplifies the colloquial tone. Literary allusions are also one of Atwood’s main techniques. Her referral to Shakespeare, Ibsen and Shaw, Henry James, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, William Thackeray and Karl Jung, helps to emphasise her points and ideas, and indicates the assumption that her audience is educated enough to follow on. This “name dropping” technique demonstrates her academic ability and her capacity to offer a broad base of information for her audience, which provides the perfect opportunity to persuade them to her point of view. Through these techniques, Margaret Atwood and Paul Keating are able to effectively engage their audiences and draw connections between themselves and their content. Their purposes are clear and focussed, and via their structure and the passion of the speaker, they are able to powerfully persuade their ideas and values.