Y10W33RC Speak to Move People

This week you are exploring how a speaker uses rhetoric, imagery, and evidence together to move an audience toward action. The reading gives you practice in identifying how persuasion works at the level of specific language choices — not just what is being argued, but how the argument is constructed to create a particular effect. As you read, stay alert to the moments where the speech shifts register or strategy, and consider what each shift is designed to do to the listener.

Persuasive — Speech

A speech is a piece of oral composition — writing designed to be delivered aloud to a live audience — and it operates according to a different logic from written argument. Writers use this form to persuade: to move an audience emotionally, intellectually, and practically toward a particular view or course of action. The content typically combines personal story or imagery to engage the audience's empathy, followed by clearly reasoned claims supported by evidence, and usually ends with a direct appeal for action or a memorable closing image. Structurally, a speech tends to move from the particular to the general — opening with something immediate and human before expanding to the broader case — and the subheadings in a written script signal these deliberate structural shifts. As a reader of a written speech, your role is to hold the imagined audience in mind: ask not just whether the argument is logically sound, but whether it is well designed to move the specific people it is addressed to, using the full range of rhetorical, emotional, and logical resources available to the speaker.

Before You Read

  • The speech is organised under subheadings that function as section markers. Before you begin reading, scan those headings and consider what the progression they suggest reveals about how the speaker has planned the persuasive journey from opening to close.
  • Think about speeches or presentations you have encountered — in assemblies, at events, in films or online — that felt genuinely persuasive rather than merely informative. Consider what those speakers did differently from someone who simply presented facts, and what made the difference feel emotional as well as rational.
  • The speech is structured to build toward a specific request. As you read, track how the speaker earns the right to make that request — how trust, evidence, and emotional engagement are developed before the call to action arrives.

While You Read

  • Notice how the speaker moves between different modes of persuasion — personal narrative, factual evidence, and direct address to the audience — and pay attention to where each transition occurs and what effect it creates.
  • The subheadings divide the speech into deliberate phases. Read each section as having a specific job to do in the overall argument, and consider how each one prepares the audience for what follows.
  • When the speaker uses specific numbers or data, pause to evaluate their function: are they presented as standalone evidence, or are they embedded in a broader emotional or logical context that shapes how they land?
  • Pay close attention to the moments when the speaker directly addresses the audience with 'you.' This is a rhetorical technique with a particular effect — notice when it appears and what it asks the listener to do or feel.

Read With Purpose

  • Observe how the speaker balances emotional appeal with evidence-based reasoning — and consider whether one mode dominates, or whether the speech earns its persuasive force by combining both in a specific sequence.
  • Notice how the imagery of one character is used not just as a story but as a recurring structural device — observe what it opens, what it closes, and what that repetition communicates to the audience.
  • Consider how the speech positions the audience as people who already have the power to act — and what rhetorical choices create that sense of agency rather than guilt or obligation.

Now read

The speech

~6 min read · ~981 words

A Speech That Moves People

Good morning. My name is Zara Okonkwo, and I am here today to ask you to do something that might feel small, but I promise you — it is not.

I want to talk to you about a library. Not the one in this building, though I have spent many hours in it. I want to talk about the Hardale Community Library — the one on Elm Street, three minutes’ walk from the bus stop where most of us get dropped off after school. You may have walked past it without going in. I want to change that.

When Libraries Become Waiting Rooms

Let me tell you about the afternoon I met Dara.

I was in the Hardale library last winter, working on an assignment at one of the long tables near the window. A girl a few years younger than me sat down across from me and pulled out a maths textbook. She had no laptop. She stayed for three hours. When

I asked her why she was there, she said: ‘It’s warm, it’s quiet, and nobody tells me to hurry up.’

She was not there for the books. She was there because she had nowhere else to be.

I have thought about Dara almost every day since. Because what she described was not a library. It was a waiting room. And I believe — with evidence, with logic, and with everything I know about this community — that it can be something far more than that.

What a Library Can Do

Let us be honest about what libraries are. They are not, as some people assume, relics — dusty rooms for people who do not know how to use the internet. A library is one of the only public spaces in any neighbourhood where you can walk in without spending money, without a membership, without an appointment. Where you can access databases, legal information, government forms, and job listings. Where a student can print a resume, an elder can learn to video call their grandchild, and a young person without internet at home can complete a school assignment.

The Hardale library currently opens four days a week. It has two part-time staff.

Its collection has not been updated in seven years. Last year, it was shortlisted for closure.

I am asking you to help make sure that does not happen.

The Case for Investment

You may be thinking: this sounds like a problem for the council, not for us. And you are right that the council makes the final decision. But the council makes decisions based on evidence of community need. It responds to numbers — attendance figures, petition signatures, letters from residents. It responds to visibility.

Here is what we know. In the twelve months since a volunteer reading programme was introduced at the Hardale library, junior school participation in the programme increased by sixty-three percent. Eleven new community groups have registered to use the meeting room. Average weekly attendance has risen from forty-seven to one hundred and twelve people. These are not small shifts. These are signals that the community wants this space to exist.

And here is what we also know. Libraries in similar postcodes that maintained or increased their opening hours reported measurable reductions in reported youth isolation and stronger rates of local employment support uptake. The evidence is not abstract. It is documented, replicable, and relevant to Hardale specifically.

What We Are Actually Asking

This is not a campaign to save something old. This is a campaign to build something new — or rather, to allow something that has already started building itself to continue.

The proposal before the council is specific. It asks for funding to extend opening hours to six days per week, to hire a third staff member, and to allocate a modest annual budget for collection renewal. The estimated cost is less than the price of one street-lighting upgrade. The projected return — in reduced demand on other council services, in community wellbeing, in educational access — is, according to independent modelling, several times the investment.

We are not asking for charity. We are asking for a decision based on evidence.

The Question That Stays With Me

I keep coming back to Dara. I keep thinking about what it means to be twelve years old in a suburb where the libraries close at four, where the community centres have waiting lists, where ‘a quiet place to think’ is not something you can take for granted.

Every one of us in this room has had access to a space where we could concentrate, where we felt welcome to stay, where our presence was not conditional on spending money or knowing the right people. Many of us take that for granted. Many of our neighbours cannot.

A library is not a luxury. It is infrastructure — as necessary to a functioning community as roads, lighting, or clean water. It is the place where the youngest and the least resourced members of a community can access the same information as everyone else. Where opportunity becomes, even fractionally, more equal.

The Moment Is Now

The council vote on the Hardale library’s future is in six weeks.

I am asking you today to sign the petition, which you will find at the back of this room. I am asking you to write one letter — just one — to your local representative.

And I am asking you, if you have ever benefited from a library, a reading programme, a quiet room where someone let you think — to say so, clearly, to the people who need to hear it.

Dara is still going to the Hardale library. She is now part of the junior reading programme. Last month, she gave a two-minute presentation to a group of adults about a book she had read. She was nervous. She was magnificent.

That is what a library can do.

The question is only whether we will let it.

Thank you.

Check your vocabulary knowledge

relics n.
objects or places that belong to the past and are considered outdated or no longer relevant
replicable adj.
able to be reproduced or repeated with the same results in other contexts
infrastructure n.
the basic systems and structures that allow a community or society to function
conditional adj.
only available or permitted if certain requirements are met
modelling n.
the use of data and analysis to project likely future outcomes or costs