Heck Rhetorical Analysis Essay 1

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Chloe Heck Eng 1101 Prof. Geiselman 12. Oct. 2018 Rhetorical Analysis of Susan David’s “The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage” In November of 2017, a crowd was gathered in a dark theater waiting to hear one of the many inspirational women of TED speak about their various issues. They were not aware of just how moving of a speech they were about to be present for. The stage lights were all trained on Susan David, a woman from South Africa who was smiling pleasantly on the stage. This event was for gifted women speakers to share an important message, a life story, and over all a gift for the audience in the form of knowledge and speech. Susan David’s speech contained all of that and more. Emotional agility is the term she created to explain how to have a more healthy, meaningful life by being aware of and accepting all of your emotions. In a world of people who suppress negative emotions and embrace false positivity, she hopes her speech will change this cycle of pain and help people cope with and identify their emotions. People view emotions as good or bad when they are all natural and experiencing them enhance our lives as human beings. Susan believes “how we deal with our inner world drives everything.” By using the rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos, and logos, she is able to persuade her audience to take a deeper look at themselves and consider expanding their own emotional agility. Susan uses ethos to prove her credibility in her work and research in many ways. Being a psychologist, she deals with many people with various mental issues. However she notes that in her work she comes across hundreds of people who come to her saying “I don’t want to try

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because I don’t want to feel disappointed” or “I just want this feeling to go away”. So many are suffering because of their own or other people’s emotional suppression. People value being “strong” over feeling real human emotion. She has seen so many of these cases, surely enough to know that it is a serious issue. She has dealt with denial herself, and this was the very thing that inspired her to begin her research. She discovered opening up about her denial was exactly what she needed to begin her healing process and so she set out to help other people do the same. She not only has a Harvard degree, but is also understanding on the vulnerable topic of emotion. Personal experience is very important in a field such as this, because it makes people more comfortable in your presence and changes the nature of the speech from a tone of making people feel like they are doing something wrong to one of understanding and trust in Susan. You can study anything, but without experiencing it, you will still only be researching and reading about a subject without fully understanding it. Pathos is an incredibly important factor in a good speech, and she relates to the audience very well using this element of rhetoric. Repeatedly Susan says and uses the theme of “sawubona”. It is a Zulu word for hello but more directly translates to “I see you, and by seeing you, I bring you into being”. It is a very beautiful sentiment. The intention behind using it to greet the audience is to immediately let the audience know she really sees them and values and accepts their emotions. It makes a very large emotional impact. She goes into discussing her childhood. Susan lost her father when she was 15. He had been battling cancer and unable to live his normal life eventually towards the end of his life. He died before he even turned 45, before he could see Susan graduate. As her father got more sick, he could no longer support the family and his wife had to try to keep up everything. Susan was still trying to stay strong and just act like

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she was doing “okay”. In her words, she said “But back home, we struggled. My father hadn’t been able to keep his small business going during his illness. And my mother, alone, was grieving the love of her life trying to raise three children, and the creditors were knocking.” She suppressed everything, praised for being the strong one, admired for it. We all only have so much strength, and when her eighth grade teacher gave her a blank notebook to write her true feelings in it, she poured it all out onto the pages. Her entire heart was written out amongst the lines and spaces and ink. Through this she healed. Telling the audience about this teaches them that feeling emotions, even the negative ones, is okay and perfectly normal, and even healthier to do. Once she had bonded with everyone, she moved into the section of her speech more driven by logos. Susan began by saying “The World Health Organization tells us that depression is now the single leading cause of disability globally- outstripping cancer, outstripping heart disease. And at a time of greater complexity, unprecedented technological, political, and economical change, we are seeing how people’s tendency is more and more to lock down into rigid responses to their emotions.” It is jarring to think about, as we think of physical disability as being the biggest thing keeping people from having jobs, from interacting with the world around us, and from having a normal life. But it turns out that depression disables even more people than that and we are ignoring it like it is no big deal. When Susan conducted a survey with over 70,000 people, she found that a third of people either judge themselves for negative emotions or actively try to repress their “bad” feelings. That is an enormous amount of people when you consider that if you apply that percentage to the entire human race you get approximately 2,480,666,667 people that suffer from emotional suppression. Suppression does

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not stop there however, as she brings up the point that people spread their own suppression to children, friends, and others they interact with. The structure of Susan’s speech is important to the message she is trying to convey. She gained the audience’s trust, won them over with her stories and own experience, and stated why and how people need to make emotional change in their lives. WIth her repeated use of the use rigid she makes it clear that with emotional rigidity, we have less meaningful lives and takes away from the human experience. The emotional state of the world is ever changing and emotional agility is needed to navigate today’s world. Through her words she spoke to the hearts and minds of everyone in the theater, and through her speech she will continue bringing acceptance as well as the idea of emotional agility to many in the future.

Work Cited: David, Susan. “The Gift and Power of Emotional Courage”. TEDxWomen 2017, November 2017, Orpheum Theater, New Orleans, LA. Keynote address.