Rhetorical analysis of the Gettysburg Address

First, let’s review the following aspects of rhetorical analysis:

Context:  situation, occasion, setting, background

Decorum:  ethics of behavior and self-expression; helps to explain why audience will be receptive to the speaker.

Exigence:  the specific part of the rhetorical context that motivated the speaker to make this argument at this moment; helps to explain why the speaker is speaking at all.

Kairos:  timeliness of the topic and the argument; helps to explain why the audience will be receptive with respect to logos.  (one of Aristotle’s appeals)

Now, listen to the NPR story “Putting Lincoln’sGettysburg Address in its Original Context.”  While you listen, annotate or highlight the Address while the commentators read it.

Individually, fill in the graphic organizer.  (handout provided)

	Context	Decorum	Exigence	Kairos
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Then, as a class, we will look at the stable wording AP prompt for the Gettysburg Address.  Note WHAT the prompt is asking you to do in 40 minutes.  INDIVIDUALLY, craft a claim statement / opening paragraph that addresses those elements.

Finally, we will review annotation models for diction, allusions, syntactical choices, and appeals.  (handout provided)

The Cornell University copy of the Gettysburg Address:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.