Breaking Down Speech Parts

¶ … Ellen at Tulane Commencement 2009 After a warm and lengthy introduction that includes many notable achievements, Ellen is brought to the podium to begin her speech. Ellen was incredibly entertaining during her commencement address to the Tulane graduates of 2009. She has an innocence about her character that is coupled with confidence which equates to a likable personality. She is humble and personable which is evident from the introduction to the end of the commencement at which point she begins dancing and running through the crowd of students.

She opens by acknowledging guests include the distinguished ones, as well as the undistinguished ones and mentions "you know who you are" (Tulane University, 2010). The entire speech is embedded with short jokes such as this. After greeting the guests, Ellen talks about her process of accepting the commencement invitation.

She admits that she did not know what a commencement was so she broke down the word into pieces -- "common cement." She also mentions that she did not go to Tulane, or any other university, and subsequently mocks the students by implying that they wasted their time and money since she is now a big celebrity and does not have a formal education. After this short joke she then transitions into the central message of the speech by sharing what she has learned through the school of hard knocks.

She begins the next transition with another round of humor and mentions that generally people who are in robes at ten o'clock in the morning have "given up" (Tulane University, 2010). She then talks about her humble career beginnings and all of the odd jobs that she had taken in her youth. Her goals at this stage in her life was to have basic cable, but even that was optional. Next she introduces tragedy to the speech.

She mentions that her girlfriend was killed in a car accident when she was young and how this prompted her to do some "soul-searching." It seems evident through the speech that this process is what sparked her career. She wrote a letter to God which was the basis for a stand-up routine that eventually lead her to the achievement of one of her first goals -- to appear on the Jonny Carson show and be the first woman to be invited over to sit after the stand-up performance.

She also mentions that she was the first and only woman to achieve this goal and it led to more career success. The next stage of her career involved a successful sitcom. But despite the success that Ellen had achieved at this point, she describes that she felt a heavy burden. Up until this point in her career she had concealed the fact that she was gay.

In 1997, while she was on The Opera Winfrey Show, DeGeneres publicly came out as a lesbian and shortly after, her character on the sitcom Ellen became the first lead in sitcom history to openly acknowledge her homosexuality on air and caused major controversy for ABC (Sigl, 2015). By being open with her sexuality, Ellen experienced a significant setback in her career. The primary theme of the speech is then revealed clearly in the.