Speeches and Essays

The core flavor, what you need to know! ⚫ Power of Style and Voice: Writers and speakers use their unique style and voice to convey their identity and influence perceptions, blending facts, emotions, and personal experiences to create impactful messages.

⚫ Understanding Speeches vs. Essays: Speeches aim to inspire and persuade through spoken words, emotion, and body language, while essays focus on explaining ideas and sharing experiences through written logic and reflection.

⚫ Critical Thinking About Media: Nonfiction, like speeches and essays, shapes beliefs and identity. By analyzing rhetorical elements, students can learn to critically evaluate messages and decide what to accept as truth.

In this lesson, you’ll learn how writers and speakers use their style and voice to “spread” ideas that reflect who they are and what they stand for.

Speeches and Essays

Just like mayonnaise blends different ingredients into one smooth mix, speeches and essays blend facts, emotions, and style to create a message that connects with people. Where the media blends messages that shape how we see ourselves, speeches and essays blend language and ideas to shape what we believe and inspire us to take action.

Speeches

- A speech is writing that’s meant to be spoken out loud to a group of people.
  - It’s made to inspire, convince, or teach the audience using voice, emotion, and body language.
  - Good speeches use things like repetition, strong words, and personal stories to make the message memorable.

Essays

- An essay is a piece of writing that’s meant to be read.
  - It usually explains an idea, shares an experience, or argues an opinion using facts and examples.
  - Essays mix logic, emotion, and personal voice to help the reader understand what the writer thinks or believes.

Speeches vs. Essay

Let’s look at a chart that compares speeches and essays in terms of their nonfiction and rhetorical elements.

Speeches vs Essays Comparison Chart
	Speeches	Essays
Purpose	To inspire, persuade, or motivate	To explain, reflect, or analyze
Audience	HEARD - connects through tone, rhythm, and emotion	READ - connects through structure, logic, and detail
Tone & Style	Conversational, emotional, repetitive	Reflective, analytical, organized
Structure	Fewer words, repeated ideas, memorable phrasing	Longer paragraphs, transitions, and developed arguments
Rhetorical Appeals	Heavy use of pathos (emotion) and ethos (credibility)	Balanced use of logos (logic) and ethos (voice)

What “ingredients” make a good speech or essay? How do these ingredients help shape how people see the world or themselves? Let’s read the excerpts below from a popular speech and a popular essay in order to see how the characteristics we’ve discussed apply to each. As you read, ask yourself:

What is the author’s message?
What rhetorical appeals are used?
What emotions or ideas stand out?
How does each piece mix facts, emotions, and personal experience?

Speech excerpts vs Essay Excerpts alt text below

View the full text from the image above.

Speech Excerpt:

From “I Have a Dream” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1963)

“I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed:
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia,
the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners
will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!”

Essay Excerpt:

From “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan (1989)

“I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language.
I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language —
the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

Lately, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks.
Like others, I have described it to people as ‘broken’ or ‘limited’ English.
But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no better way to describe it.
Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery.
That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.”

Speech vs Essay Excerpt Comparison
	Speech: “I Have a Dream” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.	Essay : “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan
Purpose	To inspire and persuade listeners to fight for equality and justice.	To reflect and explain how language shapes identity and perception.
Audience	A live audience — people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and others hearing his words later. The speaker’s tone, rhythm, and pauses make it powerful.	A reading audience — individuals who will read and think deeply about her ideas. The reader reflects on meaning through language and structure.
Tone & Style	Emotional, passionate, powerful. Designed to move people to action. Filled with imagery, emotion, and rhetorical devices.	Reflective, thoughtful, personal. Encourages understanding. Uses examples, reflection, and descriptive language to explore ideas.
Structure	Uses short sentences, repetition, and rhythm (“I have a dream…”) to be memorable when spoken.	Uses longer sentences and detailed explanations to clearly develop ideas.
Rhetorical Appeals	Heavy use of pathos (emotion) and ethos (credibility) — appeals to hope, justice, and moral values.	Strong use of logos (logic) and ethos (personal experience) — appeals to understanding and reason.

As you can see, both speeches and essays are forms of media that blend ideas and emotions to spread messages, shaping how people see the world. By understanding how they work, we learn to choose which messages — and which ‘flavors’ — we want in our own identity mix.”

Applying Understanding

Now that you’ve gone through the nonfiction elements that help achieve the purposes of speeches and essays, let’s practice identifying and analyzing these elements with examples. “The Gettysburg Address" by Abraham Lincoln will be our speech that we’re analyzing, and “Such, Such Were the Joys” by George Orwell will be our essay that we’re analyzing.

About the Author: Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States and led the country during the Civil War. He’s remembered for his strong belief in freedom and equality and for using powerful speeches, like The Gettysburg Address, to inspire and unite people.

About the Text: In “The Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln honors the soldiers who died in the Civil War and reminds Americans what their country stands for — freedom, equality, and unity. Lincoln’s speech became a powerful piece of media that spread across the nation, shaping America’s identity and uniting people—much like a viral post or media story can influence how we see ourselves today.

About the Author: George Orwell was a British writer and journalist who wrote stories and essays about truth, power, and fairness. His work often shows how language and authority can shape the way people think and see themselves — ideas that still connect to media and identity today.

About the Text: In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” George Orwell looks back on his time at a strict school that taught him who “mattered” and who didn’t. Orwell’s school acts like a form of media, sending powerful messages about who matters and how to behave, shaping his identity much like the media influences people today.

As you read, make sure that you’re comprehending the speech and essay on a surface level, but also work to recognize how the nonfiction elements in each piece work together to fulfill the author’s purpose. Both texts blend emotion, truth, and reflection—like ingredients in mayonnaise—to explore identity. Lincoln unites a nation through hope, while Orwell reclaims his story through honesty, showing how nonfiction elements shape purpose and meaning.

Comprehension Utensils alt text below.

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Keep the following comprehension utensils in your apron to pull out and use as you read, as you engage with a variety of texts:

Know your purpose and goals for reading and understanding this short story – you'll adjust as needed.
Scan and skim the story while making note of important or useful parts.
Use your prior knowledge to understand the gaps in the story.
Summarize and visualize sections of the story to help continue understanding.
Make predictions about what might happen next in the story.
Think of the different levels of meaning in the story – there is the plot, but then also the deeper elements to consider for analysis.
Remember to use context clues and parts of speech to determine unknown meanings of words.

📄🔗 Read "The Gettysburg Address" by Abraham Lincoln

📄🔗 Read "Such, Such Were the Joys" by George Orwell

Once you've finished reading, let's practice comprehension and understanding suspense, foreshadowing, and flashback in the story.

The taste test, check your understanding.

Speeches Essays | Activity

How did you do? Check your understanding below.

The signature blend, lesson recap.

Speeches and essays are two kinds of nonfiction that use persuasive tactics to influence our beliefs.

Powerful nonfiction can shape how we think and who we are.
- From Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” to Orwell’s essays, we saw how writers use purpose, tone, and structure to share truth and inspire change.
  - Lincoln’s words united people around freedom and equality, while Orwell’s warned us to question power and the media’s influence.
Media continues to shape identity today.
- Just like Orwell warned from his experience in his institution (his “media"), modern social media and news can influence what we believe and how we see ourselves.
- Understanding nonfiction helps us read critically and decide what to “take in” as truth.

Speeches and essays use things like emotions, facts, and trust to convince people and make their message strong. The way an author or speaker tells their story shows what they care about and who they are. When we study these texts, we learn how their words can influence us, shape our ideas, and help us understand what we want our own identity to be.

But we also need to be aware that writers and media use these same ingredients to persuade us. Sometimes, messages are “seasoned” to make us agree or feel a certain way. By recognizing these persuasive tactics, we can think critically about what we read, see, and share — instead of blindly following.

Great nonfiction writing blends facts and ideas — like mayonnaise — but it’s up to us to taste carefully and decide what we believe and why.

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