One of the moost powerful insights we can have into any speech act, whether it's in a play, a song, an actual speech, a letter, or any kind of speech act is to understand the answer to one question: "Why are you talking?" What made you speak up now as opposed to being silent before? What provoked you to say what you're saying?"
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Exigence can be broadly defined as "the event, situation, or reason that motivates a speaker to voice their opinion on a specific problem or situation." There's often an urgency about exigence--a problem, a decision, a danger--that the speaker understands and now needs the audience to understand as well. It's the switch that turns on the speech.
To understand that exigence, we also need to figure out the context. What's going on? Who is this speaker? What is their relationship to the situation? What happened just before? What might happen afterwards? Context is the bigger picture, culturally and socially, because we (and fictional characters as well) don't exist in a void. WHO we are and WHAT happened to us before and WHY it happened and WHEN and WHERE are all crucial elements that inform our relationship to a speaker and to their content. |
The Blurb
Background Knowledge
The Speech Itself
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The good news is that the speech itself will often give this information up early on in the process because establishing context and exigency makes the speaker's purpose and audience relationship much more clear.
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Directions
What you'll see here will be a variety of selections from different speeches. Most of these are the initial paragraphs or sentences. What can you figure out about the following questions from this information?
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Selection 1
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Selection 2
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FRODO: "I can't do this, Sam."
SAM: "I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn't. Because they were holding on to something." FRODO: "What are we holding on to, Sam?" SAM: "That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for." |
Selection 3
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Jocelyn : [holding up two belts] It's a tough call. They're so different.
[Andy snickers; everyone in the room stops and stares at her] Miranda Priestly : Something funny? Andy Sachs : No... No, no, nothing's... you know, it's just... both those belts look exactly the same to me. You know, I'm still learning about this stuff and, uh... Miranda Priestly : "This stuff"? Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room... from a pile of "stuff". |