SOAPST for "Speech to the Troops at Tilbury"

Subject - Queen Elizabeth's support for her troops

 Occasion - 1588 at Tilbury before an attack by the Spanish Armada

Audience - The English soldiers and the larger world

Purpose - Encouraging her troops to face the battle with courage and determination

Speaker - Queen Elizabeth

Tone - Assuring, motivating, inspiring, powerful, nationalistic, and charismatic

The SOAPST is important in understanding the given speech, because it offers a practical way to approach the concept of the rhetorical situation. It gives general background of the speech and a general view of what the speech is about. Understanding the purpose of the SOAPST can help the audience connect to the speech emotionally. The occasion and the speaker helps the audience understand the choice (diction) and arrangement (syntax) of the words. Often the biggest challenge is understanding the tone of the piece, because it is the tone that can achieve the speaker's purpose. Using the SOAPST, one can understand the tone.

Queen Elizabeth's speech is effective because the queen appealed to ethos, pathos, and logos. Since, Queen Elizabeth is a queen, her automatic ethos as the monarch is established, still she begins and ends her speech by stating how confident she is in her subjects. She appeals to pathos by revealing her personality as a weak and old woman, but she swears to her audience that on the inside she is as strong as a king. Not so evident, is Queen Elizabeth's logos, but her promise to repay her loyal troops with rewards can be considered to be a logical extension of her support for them.