And how can a pig teach us the principles of effective speech making?
The answer to the first question is of course … George Orwell! If you’re reading this and you have a teenager who is studying Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (or indeed, if you studied it yourself at school – I know I did 27 years ago), you’ll know that it was written as an allegorical tale that links to the history of Soviet Russia. Each of the main characters are representative of important figures in Soviet Russian history. The pigs, who are ‘generally recognised as being the cleverest of the animals’ on the farm are the self-appointed leaders of the animals, and the first leader is Old Major. Old Major is responsible for inciting an animal revolt against the human farmers. The parallels between him and the leader of the October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, are easy to see. The revolution established the Bolsheviks in power at the same time as establishing communism in Russia. As the animal representative of Lenin (and the philosopher whose ideas formed the basis of communism, Karl Marx), Old Major addresses his audience as ‘Comrades’ and preaches beliefs about communism.
Because Old Major is, in effect, a Russian revolutionary dressed up in pig’s clothing, he is surprisingly eloquent and persuasive. For this reason, there is a lot that a GCSE student can learn about effective speech making from this erudite pig.
Before I go onto outline what these principles might be, it’s worth pointing out why speech making is important at GCSE. First of all, most curriculums contain a module on rhetoric. The ability to analyse rhetorical devices is developed at secondary school, partly because there is an acknowledgement that spoken language can be just as rich a source of language and ideas as written text. Students will be expected to analyse speeches in writing, as well as write their own in the English language GCSE paper. In addition, a student’s ability to speak eloquently is assessed by all exam boards, thanks to a decision made by Ofqual. Even this year, when standard exams have been replaced by centre-based assessments, spoken language is still being assessed by schools and moderated by the exam boards. Typically, in these spoken assessments, students need to deliver a speech. So, it’s well worth learning the principles of rhetoric and the devices that a speech maker can use to engage and move their audience to action.
What Old Major can teach a student about rhetoric
Before a student starts to unpack Old Major’s techniques, it’s essential that they understand the main points of the speech. Hence the activity I help them to work through here.
If you’d like to find out more about how I help students to analyse and to write their own speeches, just get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.
Once that it done, more confident tutees can go through the speech, highlighting the rhetorical devices and explaining their effects. For students who need more support, I tend to design a matching task such as this one and we talk through the effects of each of the techniques once the student has identified them in turn.
Broadly, each of the techniques is persuasive – Old Major wants to incite a revolt against the human farmers. However, in analysing language, students need to be more specific than this. So, they might argue, for example, that the effect of the emotive language is to frighten the animals into action, as the words ‘scream your lives out’ creates an image of a terrifying death which an animal would want to avoid at all costs. In contrast, the hyperbolic promise of becoming ‘rich and free’ overnight makes the animals feel that their dream is readily attainable and worthy of the effort and risk of a revolt.
If a tutee is analysing rhetoric for a written paper (rather than emulating the techniques in their own speech), they will have to produce an analytical essay, with paragraphs which follow the PEEL structure. For these students, I’ll often model a paragraph such as this one. Students can then go on and write their own paragraphs about Old Major’s rhetorical techniques.
If, on the other hand, they have to compose their own speeches, Old Major’s speech can serve as a model for a talk on something a little less contentious than a rebellion. A student can, for example, persuade their classmates to stage a peaceful protest / to organise a petition against the use of single use plastics in their schools.
