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George W. Bush ■ Address to the Nation on September 20, 2001 107

SKILLS LANGUAGE AND STYLE
AP ® PRACTICE Syntax for Effect LANGUAGE AND STYLE
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Think about the audience you identified in the previous workshop. Which
syntactical moves (e.g., parallel structure, rhetorical questions, repetition,
juxtaposition) would you use in an argument to convince that audience?
Audience
Claim
Syntactical Move and Example
Syntactical Move and Example
Syntactical Move and Example

Address to the Nation

on September 20, 2001

George W. Bush

THE TEXT IN CONTEXT
On September 20, 2001, in his first year of an eight-
year presidency, George W. Bush (b. 1946) delivered
the following speech before the joint houses of
Congress. Our forty-third president vowed to pursue
terrorists around the world and praised the American
people for their courage and unity. The speech was
televised to the American people who had nine
days earlier, on September 11, 2001, experienced
the first terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Al Qaeda, an
Islamic terrorist group, hijacked commercial air-
planes, crashing two into the World Trade Center in Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo
New York, one into the Pentagon, and one making
a failed attempt at the nation’s capital, crashing in
Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In these attacks, 2,977
Americans lost their lives and over 25,000 were
injured. The following is an excerpt of President
Bush’s speech.

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