Thesis - Chris Abani Speech

A speech is a tool. It can be used to shape, shift, and question the listener's feelings and ideas. It can be a flat argument or conversation on a single observation of thought, but it can also be a compounded intellectual presentation which mixes fact and fiction with human emotion. When presented, it can lead a person to feel joy, such as with a cute story of a child, to feeling pain, with the child's life meeting an abrupt end. The speaker can use this kind of method to intentional push and pull at the audience's heartstrings or even to grab their attention, but what makes the listeners react in the ways they do? What is it about the stories and suggestions presented to us that stir and provoke our feelings so deeply? Why do we even have a process of reaction? The subjects heard and brought to us are taken in by our minds and connected to our emotional interior as our natural sympathy, compassion, indifference, disdain, or what have you takes the information and form a natural relation between the lives we live and the stories we hear.