Alicia's Blog

In our last unit for our first year of IB Language & Literature, we focused more on a current event which was the war that has been occurring between Ukraine and Russia. We viewed this event mainly through Ukraine’s perspective, specifically through the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with his speeches targeted towards different countries. We learned about the use of different rhetorical devices in his speeches, understanding more about how Zelenskyy is able to appeal more to his targeted audience, and how he is able to let others understand more about Ukraine’s current issue through the perspective of Ukrainians. Comparing to our previous units, this unit does not focus as much on feminism, but more on politics and war.

One of the first assignments that we had worked on this unit was to identify ethos, pathos, logos in our lives. We came up with an argument that we think is important to us, and used the rhetorical devices—ethos, pathos, and logos—to make our argument convincing. We had to explain our appeal, as well as why it is the appeal that we chose. For my argument, I came up with “more school food choices during lunch”, then explaining the different appeals that can be used to make my argument more convincing.

Throughout the unit, we analyzed more of Zelenskyy’s speech individually, starting with his speech to the Israeli Knesset. We had to read through Zelenskyy’s speech to identify the purpose of his speech, how he attempted to persuade Israel to get what he wants, how and why he appeals to the different rhetorical devices, and how persuasive we think the speech is and why.

Similar to the previous assignment, we analyzed more of Zelenskyy’s speech, identifying the purpose of his speech, how he attempted to persuade his audience, how and why he appeals to the different rhetorical devices, and how persuasive we think the speech is. However, for this assignment, we chose a speech that he has targeted to that we are interested in. I chose the speech “Address by President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the participants of the Group of Seven summit” as I wanted to identify the differences between how Zelenskyy had targeted his speech to an individual country, and how he targeted his one speech to several countries.