The Dramatastic Pentad

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Running Head: The Dramatistic Pentad The Dramatistic Pentad Charlie Chaplin was considered by many to be one of the best comedian actors of the silent film era of movies. Chaplin was featured in many films, the majority of them silent and comedies. Though he was known for his work in silent films, the first film that Chaplin did was very successful. The film The Great Dictator is in genre a comedy, the last part of film introduces a speech by Charlie Chaplin that has been labeled on of the greatest speeches of all time by many. This speech is a great speech to analyze using the dramatistic pentab, a tool used for analyzing persuasive speeches. The dramatistic pentab is a rhetoric tool that was used by Kenneth Burke, a communication theorist. According to Burke, persuasion is the way that a communicator attempts to get their audience to accept their view as reality (Griffin , 2006). The dramatistic pentab is used to look critically at a particular speech by looking at the elements in the speech. Burke have five elements of the dramatistic pentab that he claims are part of the “human drama” in a speech. These five elements are; act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (Griffin, 2006). Using these terms a critic is able to tell what the motive is behind a particular speech, generally persuasive. By looking at these five elements, a person is able to understand how the speaker is persuading the audience. The act of the “drama” or speech is what was actually done with the speech, or the event of the speech. The scene of the speech is the setting in which the speech is being done, for example the venue that someone is giving a speech such as a high school. The agent is the actual speaker of the speech, the one who is delivering the message. The agency is the tools with which the speech is being delivered. This is referring to the method or technique that someone is

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