Lou Gehrig’s “Farewell to Baseball” provides us with an opportunity to consider the critical roles of speakers, citizen-critics, and rhetorical critics. As speakers, we can learn from the speech, as it is an example of several of the principles of public speaking that we have developed in this course; we can consider these whenever we speak on ceremonial occasions. As citizen-critics, we can listen for the shared values of the community reflected in the speech, consider their merits, and think about how we would respond as the next speaker to attempt a fitting response, either reinforcing and extending the values or modifying and revising them depending on the new exigence. As rhetorical critics, we can analyze the speech itself; for this lesson, we will focus on the structure of the speech.

Follow the steps below to complete this part of the assignment:

1. Read and listen to Lou Gehrig’s “Farewell to Baseball,” delivered on July 4, 1939. (Read the speech; do not just watch the short video excerpt.)”
2. After you view and read the speech, identify the ideas and values that make up the claims and evidence that are the content of the speech. 3. Then, consider the structure. The speech does not follow all of the advice given by the Zarefsky textbook, of course; ceremonial speeches often privilege resonance of ideas over clarity of expression, and Gehrig’s speech does not contain all of the functions of an introduction, conclusion, or transition that you will be expected to use in your speech—just most of them.
3. In your rhetorical situation, the constraints and opportunities for your speech assignment include using the strategies and tactics for structure in the textbook. Using those strategies, analyze the structure of Lou Gehrig’s “Farewell to Baseball.”

Submission Guidelines

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3. Include a word count in your submission.
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