Speeches, Letters and Essays: Reading for Genre

The form is part of the argument

Exam passages are overwhelmingly speeches, letters and published essays. Each form gives the writer a different set of tools and a different set of constraints, and knowing which you are holding tells you what to look for before you read a line.

A speech is heard once

The audience cannot go back a paragraph. Everything that helps a listener is therefore a rhetorical choice, not a stylistic tic:

• Repetition and anaphora do the work that a written heading would do — they mark structure aloud.
• Parallelism and triads make a list memorable enough to survive one hearing.
• Direct address and second-person pronouns keep a room implicated.
• Short sentences after long ones land where a written text would use italics.
• The occasion in the room matters: a graduation, a funeral, a surrender. Half the audience's expectations come from the event, not the speaker.

A letter has one reader, and we are reading over their shoulder

Letters are written to a named person, which produces effects a speech cannot:

• Obligation — the writer can invoke a shared history or a promise the reader made.
• Intimacy and its uses — a rebuke is far heavier from someone who begins with affection.
• The overheard audience — an open letter is addressed to one person and aimed at everyone. Where a letter explains something its named reader already knows, the explanation is for us.

An essay expects an argumentative reader

A published essay has room to anticipate objections, define terms, qualify, and build a long line of reasoning. Look for structural moves: the definition placed early to control the argument, the concession placed to buy credibility, the example returned to at the end so the ending closes a circle.