Critique on speech: “Prescription Drug Commercials” by Andrea Kelly
I would like to begin by mentioning the negative aspects of this speech.
The speaker used the appeal to fear method poorly. There was no “ethos”, which means there was no credibility. She tried to persuade the audience to not believe the advertisements put out by drug companies, yet she could not be trusted enough because the audience didn’t know if she was qualified to criticize such things. The speaker lacked passion, which made the speech look a bit informative and dull at some points. She was also very one-sided. She generalized her message that all drug commercials are misleading without mentioning that some peoples’ lives are saved by those drugs. She also did not mention that people that most people that died from these drugs’ side effects had misused them by taking higher doses than the ones their doctors prescribed them. All that made her credibility drop. If she wasn’t so negative maybe she would earn the trust of her audience; that’s because some people in her audience may have benefited from those drugs so she would earn their trust too by mentioning that there are good aspects of those drugs if used right and for the right reasons. Also she didn’t seem very passionate about the subject. Her body movements were stiff which made it look like she was delivering an informative speech at certain times. Her introduction was not well organized. I didn’t spot a thesis statement and it was unclear what her speech was going to be about. She tried to capture the audience’s attention by having them look at those pictures but in my opinion she failed, because her visual aids were poorly put together. The television that was used was small, and so were the pictures and the letters she used and the audience couldn’t read the sentences on the visual aids nor could they see the pictures. The coloring she used for the sentences were poorly matched and they didn’t stand out. The sentences were...