Persuasive Strategies in Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign Speeches

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how a political leader can propagate ideology through the tactful use of language. It has been investigated how different linguistic tools have been used to project or achieve political objectives. Therefore, the paper is devoted to the exploration of persuasive and manipulative strategies utilized by the democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in her campaign speeches. This paper is framed under the scope of discourse analysis wherein three speeches of Hillary Clinton are highlighted to fathom the ways in which she mesmerizes her audience through the use of certain linguistic and rhetorical devices and crafts to inject her ultimate goal of persuading people and indoctrinate her ideology so as to gain as many voters as possible .The selected speeches have been analyzed qualitatively using analytical framework of Barbra Johnstone's work (2008) about persuasive strategies.