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Rhetorical Analysis Of President Bush's Address To The Nation

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The Address to a Shaken Nation In President Bush’s Address to the Nation Speech the day after September 11 (9/11) in 2001, President Bush wants to inform the country of this tragic event and what was going to happen for the country. President Bush uses rhetorical devices to captures the audience’s attention and to reach this purpose. President Bush mainly use pathos, logos, anaphoras, and personifications to achieve his purpose. President Bush uses many pathos, which is the persuasion through emotion, throughout his speech to prove his point. President Bush calls out the victims of 9/11 who were “moms and dads” (Bush 1) and “friends and neighbors” (Bush 1). This is a persuasion through pathos because President Bush emphasizes the importance of these victims’ lives to other people. President Bush uses these names to influence his viewers to understand that many people loss very important people who cannot be replaced by any means. President Bush uses pathos again when he paints an image in our head of “airplanes flying into buildings [and] huge buildings collapsing” (Bush 1), which has “filled [this country] with disbelief, terrible sadness and a quiet, unyielding anger” (Bush 1). This is pathos because Bush tries to influence the feeling of those who was not there and to help them understand. President Bush uses pathos in the form of imagery to persuade the nation how devastating this event is and how it has affect the emotions of many Americans. President Bush tries to appeal to the heart of the nation by using pathos to explain how terrible 9/11 was and its effects on the people. Aside from the use of pathos, President Bush also uses logos, which is the persuasion through logic. President Bush informs the country that “these acts of mass murder [are] intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat” (Bush 1). This is a form of logos because logically the terrorist group attacked because of their hatred of freedom, and the United States was a symbol of that freedom to many people. President Bush uses logos in this situation because he wants to not only persuade his viewers that this is done by a group of terrorist, but also to inform those who do not understand why this event happens. Towards the

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