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Kennedy's Second Inaugural Address Rhetorical Analysis

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Inauguration Speeches are a custom that has existed since the very first inauguration featuring the United States first president, George Washington. During Washington’s second inauguration, after his re-election, Washington gave the shortest Inaugural address on record. This address was just 135 words. Nonetheless, every president since Washington has delivered an Inaugural address. The purpose of this address is for presidents to present their vision of the country (United States) and to set forth their goals for the nation. With that being said, this paper will use the strategy of genre analysis to critique to examine Barack Obama’s second Inaugural Address and John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech. Genre analysis is a type of rhetorical analysis that examines speeches based on the artifacts or commonalities that contain. The artifacts of speech are created by the rhetor as a response to a specific exigency. So as Bitzer’s essay, The Rhetorical Situation, saw it, in order for a text to be rhetorical, it must come in response to a rhetorical situation. Furthermore a rhetorical situation has three characteristics, an audience, an existence of constraints, and as mentioned above, an exigency. One manner, in which we can analyze an artifact, is through …show more content…
It influences how rhetors shape their ideas, stylize their discourse, and present the content and organize their form. Genre is greatly important also because it give the audience a predisposed set of expectations on what they are about to hear. Genre criticism allows a critic to analyze the aspects of a text worthy of attention and furthermore they tell us how the creator of the artifact viewed the rhetorical situation. Those are the reasons why it is important to analyze speeches and public addresses with this sort of analysis as we managed to do in this

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