Heather Hansen's Ted Talk: Rhetorical analysis

Heather Hansen, Director of the corporate training firm Global Speech Academy and global communication specialist.

Reader:

Primarily, Heather is speaking to “the 400 million who was born into the English language” – as she appeals and relates to this audience, since Heather herself is a part of this group. However, the message, content and intention of her speech is relevant on a global scale, as everyone on the planet speak different languages.

Topic:

Communication across different languages, “language ego” and language acquisition. Heather addresses the struggle that many foreigners come across when trying to learn English – striving to learn perfect English pronunciation, when there (according to Heather) can be no such thing. Heather conveys the idea of English being formed by a multitude of different accents, countries and people, rather than there only being one single “perfect” English.

Language:

Heather speaks in a distinct, somewhat “happy” manner – she laughs during her speech several times. She also urges her audience to think for themselves, sometimes directly asking the audience and probing them to actually process the things she said in their minds. For instance, at (15:51) Heather says “Think of how many different ways you could say the words “Yeah right””. This instigates the audience to run trough all the different options in their head.