two speeches with different audiences by Dana Carlat

David Foster Wallace’s speech, This is Water and Toni Morrison’s speech, Nobel lecture are both speeches with strong messages intended for specific audiences. Wallace’s speech is a commencement speech for a graduating class from a liberal arts school. Morrison’s speech is a Nobel lecture given after she won the Nobel peace prize in 1993 broaden her audience’s outlook on the art of language.

            In the commencement speech given by Wallace he begins with a metaphor of two fish swimming in water, comparing the water to life’s realities. The graduating class of the liberal arts school he is speaking to is about to enter the real world as an adult and step foot into the “water” he compares reality to. He makes his audience think about the fact that everything in the world is about them, that they are selfish, asking them to “Think about it: There is no experience you’ve had that you were not the absolute center of.” His audience could be very drawn into this harsh reality and they are most likely intrigued by the rest of his speech where he shows them a different way to think about things in life they will go through as an adult. He does this by using an example about traffic. Everyone in their cars is only worried about themselves and frustrated that they aren’t getting to somewhere on time. He makes his audience stop and think about the others also stuck in the traffic that could actually have a serious reason to get out of traffic other than their own.

            In the Nobel lecture given by Toni Morrison she also uses a metaphor at the beginning, comparing language to a dead or alive bird in the hands of two young children who have come to ask an old lady a simple question, “is it living or dead?” She shows her audience that you cannot actually tell if a language is alive or dead, you have to let It fly on its own and change itself. She mentions language differences across the world stating that English spoken in England is much different than the English spoken in Africa or America would be. You can instantly make an inference on where someone is from based on what kind of English they are speaking. Language changes over the years but it does not ever die. She appeals to her audience by stressing that language is its own art and that is beautiful.