Appunti di inglese 2B per esonero

Marc Mero Speech

I've chosen this text because about two weeks ago I was zapping on the TV and I heard this speech delivered by Marc Mero, a wrestler who overcame addiction and survived overdose, on the occasion of an invitation to a middle school, so the listeners were young students. What particularly impressed me was the important message conveyed by this speech, especially the general purpose of Marc Mero’s speech, which is to persuade the listeners about the importance of life.

Persuasiveness of the Speech

First of all, this is a persuasive text because what the speaker is trying to do here is to persuade readers not to be involved in drugs, alcohol, or bad companies. He wants to convince the students not to follow his lead. (We can see that this is not an argumentative text since Marc is not giving the listeners a choice between going down the wrong path or the right one; he is not presenting both sides of this issue, but only one aspect of it.)

Structure and Preparation

We can also see the general structure of the speech: participants are present in the interaction, there is no time-lag between the production and the reception, and there is a face-to-face interaction. This speech, I think, was a little bit prepared by Marc, keeping in mind that he was supposed to speak in front of teenagers, hence the selection of simple terms and sentence structure. However, in this speech, we don’t see other features of speech like interruptions, rephrases, and uncertainty because, as I mentioned before, it was prepared. So, it’s not like a spontaneous conversation between two friends, but a fictionalized speech. However, in the video, there are also facial expressions and gestures (paralinguistic and extralinguistic elements) that convey a lot of meaning during his discussion.

Informal Style

The style is obviously informal because of the personal and colloquial tone used. The speaker uses the first person and addresses the listeners directly using the second person. There is a simple structure; in fact, short sentences are alternated with long sentences. There are also contractions and another important element of informality is the personal style of the speech and the way it conveys emotions. There is also the use of rhetorical questions whose objective is to make people think about the consequences of the actions he is talking about.

Coherence and Cohesion

We can say that this is a text because we can see the presence of coherence (so the quality of forming a unified whole, with contextual meaning and texture) and cohesion (so semantic ties within the text that combine to create meaning), in particular there is the lexical cohesion (words that evoke a general frame ‘death, broken, broken, broken- love, marriage, family, friends’) with the lexical items, but also the reiteration of broken (the repetition of the same word to emphasize the concept) and the grammatical cohesion that particularly makes the order of sentences look logical and helps the text to move forward. We can see the additive, adversative, or causal conjunctions (plus substitution and ellipsis). There is also the referencing (the fact that a reader can make complete sense of the word he is considering only if he looks elsewhere in the text) through the use of pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and demonstratives. In this text, there is a prevalence of finite verbs in the active voice because the subject of the discourse is specified. On the other hand, there is also the use of the infinitive ‘to be’ which is a non-finite verb that, in my opinion, has been used to refer to people in general, to generalize, and to create an impersonal effect so that anyone can impersonate Marc Mero.

Formal Letter

The text (letter/review) has been written by a customer to the manager of a modern restaurant. First of all, the purpose of this text is to evaluate (in this case, the evaluation is negative) with the use of evaluative adjectives (poor, awful, rude, bad) that are employed to make personal comments considering that it is a review.

Structure and Style

The style is formal as we can see in the structure of the letter: use of full words, no contractions, and a more complex structure with long sentences, mostly subordinate clauses, and a more structured approach (points are clearly introduced, explained, and concluded). As any other written text, the letter has been planned, revised, and reviewed several times to avoid mistakes and has no emotional style or emotive punctuation.

The letter follows the conventional rules of letter writing, having some contact details in the top right corner and indicating where the letter is from. It opens by addressing the addressee and closes with a conventional form of wording (yours faithfully), followed by the writer’s signature. The letter is organized and separated into paragraphs easy to identify through punctuation and layout (one of the features of writing), each of which deals with a particular aspect of information: the first paragraph is aimed at presenting the purpose of this letter, which is the issue the customer or writer wants to talk about. The second and third paragraphs furnish all the information about the matter, in this case, this person is listing all the problems he and maybe his family had at the restaurant, like the quality of food and the service. Then in the last paragraph, there is a sort of conclusion where he recommends them to do their best to improve and solve the problems in the restaurant.

Features of Writing

Other features of writing are: it is permanent, space-bound, static, there is no distance between writer and reader, subordination is more used than coordination, and we have long sentences for the communication of ideas. There is coherence because information is presented in a logical sequence and there is a common theme (food quality, semantic field of a restaurant: meal, tables, dishes, menu).

We also have cohesion through the semantic links like conjunctions: and (additive conjunction), the repetition of but (adversative conjunction), and also by the elision of six ‘people’ and four ‘dishes’. Reference: pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, demonstratives. Deictics Verb tense: verb tenses are mainly in the past tense because in this letter the customer is also telling about the bad experience he had at the restaurant, so it’s a sort of narration, but there are also other non-finite verbs (present continuous, present perfect) that suggest something ongoing and not finished because the problem has not been solved yet.

Advertisement

This text has been written to inform but also to criticize the use of weapons in America, particularly regarding children's safety as we can see from this advertisement. It has been written by the organization Moms Demand Action to make public opinion aware of the danger of weapons, which particularly in recent times has grown even more.

I've chosen this text because I think that this issue of weapons, which is central in America, is very important. I think most of us saw on TV the news of those crazy people, who in America are allowed to bear arms, that had gone into a school and started shooting students. I think one of the last and one of the most tragic was that one in Texas which ended with 21 students dead. I mean, for parents living with the fear of not seeing your children come home from school without any reason, must be awful.

Irony and Persuasiveness

Especially, this advertisement caught my eye because of its irony, a sad irony, of course. We can see this contrast between the inscription above and the image of the children. When you read “one child is holding something that’s been banned in America to protect them” and then you look at the image, you immediately think, ‘that’s the child who is holding the weapon’, but unfortunately it is not so.

I think this text is mainly persuasive since it is trying to convince the reader to stop the use of weapons for people's safety using the image of children. In my opinion, this is like a persuasive technique, one of those convincing techniques used by writers in persuasive texts, since if the image had shown, for example, adults, elderly people, or a dog, the message wouldn’t have had the same impact. (And then this advertisement presents a situation and is clearly taking a stand against it, against the use of weapons trying to convince the reader to do so).

Multimodal Text

It’s a multimodal text because it’s an advertisement that uses images alongside written text and we move back and forth between the two to interpret the communication. There is the reference between the inscription and the image because the sense of the message wouldn’t be complete without one or the other.

Cohesion and Coherence

In terms of cohesion, we can see the substitution in the main inscription of ‘which child’ with ‘which one’ and then the substitution of ‘children’ with ‘them’ to avoid the repetition of the same item. But also in the last question, there is an elision because it was supposed to be ‘why don’t assault weapons are banned too?’ (Lexical cohesion: repetition of child). While for the coherence we have the contextual meaning.

Informal Language

The language is informal as we can see from short and concise sentences (that also have the goal to make the reader think but also focus more on the image, since this conveys more meaning about the topic). There is also the contraction of ‘has’ (that’s been banned…), the writer uses the first person ‘we’ (in my opinion, this choice has been made first of all because the producer of this text is an organization and then because the person ‘we’ has the sense of union against weapons).

Regarding the verb tense, we only have 5 verbs: is holding (present continuous, finite verb, active voice a subject takes an action which has an effect on an object), has been banned (present perfect continuous, finite verb, passive voice), to protect (to-infinitive form, non-finite form), guess (infinitive, non-finite verb, active voice), won’t sell (future, finite verb, active voice). So there is the use of finite verbs, which suggest who is involved in the action (child, people in general), where it takes place (America).