Emma Gonzalez’s March For Our Lives Speech
Her speech was not only encouraging and effective to the youth, but also adult viewers and parents.
By targeting the younger generation as her audience, it is clear to see the outcome that Emma Gonzalez’s March for Our Lives speech had on the youth. Adult viewers, on the other hand, may have a harder time interpreting just how effective her speech was. Here are the reasons the speech was so effective not only to the younger generation, but parents and adult viewers as well:
Tone
Emma uses tone extensively throughout this speech. It is a really important and significant aspect she uses to get her point across. Since this is a speech, you do not have to make an assumption of the tone. You can hear the emotion in her words as she says them and the cracking in her voice. You can see the tears running down her cheeks as she talks about her friend’s deaths. Her tone was so emotional and heart breaking, it made everyone listening feel her pain as their own. It also made parents step in her shoes and imagine their kids as one of the victims.The way she uses her tone and doesn’t hide a single feeling, you can tell just how much this topic impacts her. However, toward the end of the speech, there is an extreme tone change from a heartbroken girl who lost her friends to a very determined advocate for gun control telling people to fight for their lives. She wipes her tears from her face and completely changes her attitude to an abrupt, straightforward approach to get everyone’s attention and make them want to fight for stricter gun control.
Personal Details and Experiences
Emma uses personal details and experiences of the victims to appeal to her audience and make it more emotional to them. She uses full names of students, friends they hung out with every day, nicknames they were called, hobbies they loved participating in, and she followed all of these details by the words “would never.”
For example she states:
“Carmen would never complain to me about piano practice. Aaron Feis would never call Kyra “miss sunshine,” Alex Schachter would never walk into school with his brother Ryan, Scott Beigel would never joke around with Cameron at camp…” (paragraph, 3).
By using such personal, intimate details, it tugs on the audience’s heart because the people who were killed are now more than just students who went to the town’s local high school, they are innocent kids who had their lives taken away. They had names, hobbies, nicknames, friends, families, etc. The way she does this makes it more real for the audience bringing the names of students who died, to life. Another way she used pathos was when she discussed how the student ceased shooting, abandoned his rifle and walked among the students for an hour before being arrested. This shows how the shooter chose to stop shooting and wasn’t forced to do so. It also shows how simple it seemed for him to just blend in with the other students without being caught. Emma made the audience feel pity that we aren’t doing enough to prevent these types of tragedies from occurring. As for the parents of children who drop their kids off at school not knowing if they are going to see them again, it is eye opening.
Using her Platform as a Speaker
In this speech, Emma uses her platform as a speaker to also express pathos. She takes advantage of the fact that she is speaking to the audience directly and not writing her thoughts down on paper. Throughout the speech she repeats the words six minutes and twenty seconds, which is how long it took the shooter to take their friends and peers lives. She finishes her speech in around two minutes and stands in silence on stage for four minutes. She stares at the crowd until her speech reaches the six minute and twenty second mark. While she’s standing there, people are cheering her on to continue, clapping for support, chanting, looking around and staring. She shows how long the minutes felt in that moment but how short they were when her peers and friend’s lives were taken. This was a very intense part of the speech that made the audience so emotional and made many cry. As a parent, you can only imagine how that comparison felt and the fear it evoked in them. After the silence, this is when the shift occurred. She wasn’t the sensitive crying girl who lost her friends, she was strong and was determined to get her point across. Although she didn’t speak for four minutes of the speech, the silence spoke volumes.
Word Choice and Repetition
Emma uses her word choice and use of repetition as another rhetorical strategy. She was hurt and obviously very affected by this tragedy and the words she used reflected this. She used an abundance of detailed moments that happened, making you feel like you were there in that moment. While the words she spoke reflected her sadness and hurt, she also used some words that seemed less sensitive than others and she emphasized them for more of a reaction.
She used phrases such as,
“No one could believe that there were bodies in that building waiting to be identified for over a day”, “Everyone who has been touched by the cold grip of gun violence understands”, and “I’ll tell you where it went. Six feet into the ground, six feet deep” (paragraph, 3).
She says these words very sharp and bitter, showing a contrast in her emotions. She sort of uses her words as an alarm clock to wake the audience up but not in a way to scare people off. Also, Emma repeats the words “six minutes and twenty seconds” many times throughout the speech, as stated previously. She kept repeating these words for the audience to remember and focus on. It shows how in a matter of minutes everything had changed and many of her friends had passed away. Another key point in Emma’s word choice, is her strength she uses. Throughout the tragic event that occurred, she uses such strong, powerful words to show that she isn’t going to let this shooting be forgotten and she is going to stand up for what she believes in and persuade others of any age to do the same.
Organization of the Speech
Emma also uses the organization of her speech as a way to effectively get her point across. She organizes her speech in a way that would evoke more emotion from beginning, middle, to the end. As said in previous paragraphs, she repeats “six minutes and twenty seconds” but she does this in each section of the essay to bring it back to your attention constantly. When she transitions into the silence part of the speech, Emma leaves the audience with personal details about the victims. She then transitions into the four-minute silence and makes the last things she said resonate while she’s quiet. This is the most intense and powerful part of the whole speech.
Throughout this speech Emma uses many rhetorical aspects to persuade her audience, both young and adults, to fight for stricter gun control. She uses her tone both heartbreaking and determined, to get the audience’s attention and make them want to fight. She uses pathos with the personal details and the long silence to appeal to the their emotions and shed light onto the issue. She uses her word choice, both strong and repetitive to wake up the audience into wanting to make a change for the future. Lastly, she uses the organization of her speech to evoke more emotional responses in the audience. All of these strategies put together make her persuasion effective and ultimately make people of any age, want to take action. Emma Gonzalez was so incredible at what she was trying to accomplish, she even left the audience with an abrupt last sentence of the speech to leave them thinking:
“Fight for your lives before it’s someone else’s job.”
