The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Relating to the Audience

Document Content and Description Below

The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Relating to the Audience In her speech, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie analyzes the dangers of forming assumpt... ions or telling one story about a person, place, or thing. She expresses that single stories have the immense power to cloud the judgments and thoughts of people. Throughout her speech, Adichie emphasizes that single stories have the power to create stereotypes that could be easily deemed true despite their incompleteness. Since it is very easy to be sucked into the pitfall of mindlessness and ignorance, Adichie shares personal stories to teach lessons based on her experiences with the risks and flaws of knowing one story about either a person, place, and or culture. Even though Adichie is a Nigerian woman giving a speech to a predominantly middle aged, white American audience, she is able to engage her audience in her speech by sharing relatable, vivid personal stories and using strategic styles of presenting in order for them to easily understand the negative consequences of single stories. Adichie kept her audience interested in her speech by telling various personal stories with vivid descriptions. Personal stories were a reoccurring source of evidence that Adichie used to support most of her points in her speech, but through all of the stories that she told, the audience never got bored due to her evocative descriptions. For example, while talking about her experience in Guadalajara, Adichie gave a detailed description of what she witnessed. As Adichie says, “I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame.” What surprised Adichie was that the people in Guadalajara were just like her, normal people that are just trying to make a life for themselves [Show More]

Last updated: 1 year ago

Preview 1 out of 7 pages