Reeve and Hanks Speeches: Rhetorical Appeals Compared

Introduction: Two Speeches, Two Contexts

There are some key differences easily identified in the speeches made by Christopher Reeve and Tom Hanks. Most obviously, they are presented nearly a decade apart, with Reeve's speech occurring in 1996 and Hanks' in 2005. They are also given to widely different audiences: Reeve addresses the National Democratic Convention, while Hanks speaks to a college graduating class. Both actors, however, make a strongly emotional appeal to their audiences for help. Hanks focuses on the future potential of his audience to provide help in a very general sense, while Reeve specifically focuses on the current power of his audience to make a difference in the lives of the disabled.

Opening Strategies and Emotional Appeals

In order to achieve their goals in the minds of the audience, Christopher Reeve and Tom Hanks follow specific rhetorical approaches. Both men begin their speech with an introductory joke, appealing to the audience's sense of well-being and open-mindedness. In the case of Reeve, he makes his emotional appeal to the audience's sense of family connection. To introduce the topic he wishes to address, Reeve extends the commonly perceived definition of family to something wider: family are those bound not only by blood, but also by country. In other words, every American is a family member of every other American. It is upon this premise that the actor bases what can be construed as the thesis of his speech:

"...if America really is a family, then we have to recognize that many members of our family are hurting. And just to take one aspect of it, one in five of us has some kind of disability." (Reeve 3).

The Use of Statistics and the Central Thesis

Reeve goes on to explicate this in terms of family, suggesting that many audience members have family, close friends, or acquaintances suffering from disabilities or debilitating illnesses of some sort. This serves to bring the issue home on an emotional level, appealing to the audience's sense of urgency regarding the help and support that disabled people need. He personalizes the problem to the audience with the purpose of making it all the more difficult to ignore. Later in the speech, the actor moves on to specific examples of persons with disabilities whom he met, as well as celebrities living with disability or debilitating illness. He therefore makes his appeal both personal — in terms of individual audience members — and universal in terms of society as a whole, emphasizing the fact that nothing exempts anyone from debilitating illness, accidents, or genetics. In this, Reeve's approach is much more specific than that of Hanks.

Tom Hanks takes somewhat longer than Reeve to reach the thesis of his speech. After the opening humor, he begins with a statistical claim relating to the "power of four." According to a study he cites, only four percent of cars need to be removed from gridlocked highways to secure the free flow of traffic. Hanks uses this premise to appeal to his audience's sense of power. It is worth noting briefly that Reeve's statistic is very similar: one in five people suffers from a disability — in other words, for every four people without disabilities, there is one who does. There are therefore four healthy people in every five to whom Reeve is addressing his appeal for help.

While Reeve's focus is on a very specific social problem, Hanks' approach focuses on the difference that a single decision from a very small percentage of people can make in society. The first part of his speech therefore addresses the number "four" and the power that this number entails. The emotional appeal of this section is one of surprise and motivation, while Reeve's focuses very much on the recognition of need.

Conclusion: Power, Hope, and Practical Action

Both Reeve's words, designed for an older, politically oriented audience, focus on past achievements and power. The actor uses these as a basis for an appeal to the future potential of the country to reach even greater feats by helping others to reach their full potential. Hanks' words, by contrast, focus more on the future. The young people who are his audience stand on the brink of adulthood, and Hanks therefore seeks to inspire them with precisely the kind of transformative power Reeve describes — the conviction that the impossible is achievable.