Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation in Ronald Reagan’s Challenger Address

 PART 1 In this essay, you will analyze Ronald Reagan’s “White House Address to the Nation,” popularly referred to as the Challenger address, in terms of the rhetorical situation. Your essay must address each element of the rhetorical situation to provide supporting evidence for your claims by drawing from the concepts in your book, from your own observations about the speech, and from what you find in the scholarly literature. Steven Mister’s article, additional reading for this Lesson, should also be used in your argument. These outside sources will be particularly helpful in providing specific information about the audience, the historical context, the events, the president, and NASA. Before viewing the speech, be sure to read Chapter 4 in your textbook on listening and thinking critically. The concepts and techniques described in the chapter will help you when listening to Reagan’s address. Review, also, Chapter 6; considering the purpose behind President Reagan’s speech will help you with your analysis. Zarefsky, David. Public Speaking: Strategies for Success. 7th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2014. ISBN: 978-0205857265. Your paper should be approximately 600–900 words, or two to three double-spaced pages, in Times New Roman with 12-point font and indented paragraphs. Include a word count in your submission. You must have a minimum of three scholarly sources from the Communication and Mass Media database at libraries.psu.edu (or from a similar scholarly database) to support your claims., such as journal articles or scholarly books, for this paper – and it is especially important to include and use the scholarly articles that are part of the assigned reading for this Lesson. In addition, you can use news magazines, such as Time or Newsweek, and newspaper articles for background and historical information. Sources that originate on the Internet are not acceptable. (This means that, if you have a source that was originally published in print but is available online, it is okay to use that source). Remember to take advantage of the Penn State University Libraries search engines. In particular, you may find the New York Times Historical and the ProQuest search engines helpful for this and many of your other assignments. All papers must be free from typographical and spelling mistakes. Errors of grammar, syntax, and composition affect the assignment grade. PART 2 Please indicate the topics for your two major speeches in this course. Please read the activity requirements below so that you understand the specific expectations for each presentation. –The Rhetorical Situation speech will be a six- to eight-minute speech in which you analyze a speech according to the concepts of the rhetorical situation. This is an expanded version of the assignment you are doing for the Challenger address in this lesson. You may choose any speech (from such sources as American Rhetoric) that interests you and your audience, except for movie-speeches or speeches that are discussed elsewhere in the lessons for this course. These speeches cannot be analyzed in your Rhetorical Situation speech assignment: Martin Luther King, Jr. – I Have a Dream Ronald Reagan – Challenger Address Robert F. Kennedy – Remarks on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Mary Fisher – A Whisper of AIDS George W. Bush – Address to the Nation, September 20, 2001, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – First Inaugural Address John F. Kennedy – Inaugural Address Barack Obama – First Inaugural Address Lou Gehrig – Farewell to Baseball Abraham Lincoln – The Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln – The Second Inaugural Address Barack Obama – A More Perfect Union John F. Kennedy – Ich Bin Ein Berliner Ronald Reagan – Remarks at the Brandenburg Gates Viola Davis – 2015 Emmy Acceptance Speech You must be able to access a full-text version of the speech and, preferably, audio and/or video. Please include the name of the speech, the name of the speaker, the date the speech was given, and where you found the text/audio/video online (providing the link or URL). –The Cultural Commonplaces speech will be a six- to eight-minute speech in which you analyze a cultural artifact according to the critical methods developed later in this course. Your artifact should be something that the audience can recognize and engage with. Examples of artifacts for this speech include (but are not limited to) pieces of art, advertisements (print, radio, television, Internet, billboards), television shows, movies, books, short stories, poetry, commercial products, monuments, video games, music, music videos, religious artifacts, and sports. This list is not exhaustive, and you can propose something not listed above that you feel strongly about.