Produce a five-paragraph essay on the prompt below. Make sure you properly cite all of the sources you used, regardless if you quoted from them or not.
The commencement speech is a time-honored conventions of the graduation ceremony. The speaker, usually someone of some renowned, will stand before the crowd of young women and men and their parents, family, and friends and offer some words of wisdom about how to live a good life. While the genre has produced some memorable (and even important) works, it also runs the danger of churning out formulaic, lazy, and sappy speeches.
For your final short essay, I’d like you to read, watch, or listen to the four of the five commencement speeches I’ve linked below and pay close attention to the strategies used by the rhetors to establish trust and authority. Moreover pay attention to the similarities and differences between the speeches. Finally, if there are differences, what kind of differences are they? Do they merely modify generic convention or do they outwardly challenge it?
As you prepare the essay, make sure that the essay has a cohesive structure that flows from the thesis/introduction. The questions above are a guide–do not use them to structure your essay.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/the-full-text-of-steve-jobs-stanford-commencement-speech-2011-10
2. https://time.com/4341712/obama-commencement-speech-transcript-morehouse-college/
3. https://speakola.com/grad/chadwick-boseman-harvard-commencement-2018
4. https://www.hws.edu/news/transcripts/vonnegut.aspx
5. https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
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