Test Your Understanding

In this lesson, you learned to identify a speaker’s position and supporting evidence. You also learned to analyze delivery techniques. Now it’s time to apply this analysis to one last speech.

Before you begin, remember these points:

1. Before you watch the speech, make predictions based on your knowledge of the speaker, context, and audience.


2. During the speech, take notes as you listen for the speaker’s position and supporting evidence.


3. Consider how the speaker begins the speech, the support given in the body of the speech, and how the speaker concludes.


4. Listen for changes in tone.


5. Listen for how the speaker uses delivery techniques such as pauses, pace, voice, metaphors and symbolism, repetition and parallelism, and vocabulary.


6. Notice how the speaker uses gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, and humor.

This speech was delivered to a women’s convention in 1851. The speaker, Sojourner Truth, was born a slave with the name Isabella Baumfree. After she gained her freedom, she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and traveled around the country speaking out against slavery. This speech, however, was not made at an abolitionist conference, but at a women’s suffrage conference.

In this contemporary clip, actress Alfre Ette Woodard performs Sojourner Truth’s famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?”