Martin Sheen’s Me to We Speech

Listening to this speech was truly enjoyable for me. I already know quite a bit about this cause, because Me 2 We in my school invites well-known activists to our school, most recently Spencer West. Martin Shee is an actor, who you may recognize from movies such as The Amazing Spiderman (2012). This is my opinion on his public speaking skills.

 

Martin Sheen uses skills he has from acting in public speech. In fact, one might have been able to tell he was an actor by just listening to his speech alone. He uses his powerful voice in this speech, an important tool for an actor. He also knew which phrases to recite with more volume, which makes the overall speech more appealing. However, in some places, he overused this technique. Eventually I felt he was yelling at the audience most the time. In other words, he should have contrasted loud with soft, which would contribute to the effect. Another sign of his acting skill is his dynamic hand gestures. As I’ve mentioned in my last essay, these hand gestures contribute to meaning (in this case, they show how passionate he is) and make the speech more intriguing. So this is how Martin Sheen used his acting skills in his speech.

I also like the content of the Martin Sheen’s speech, which probably counts for more than the content in Barack Obama’s speech since a professional scriptwriter wrote his. Sheen’s speech made use of powerful statistics, as well as the occasional metaphor. I liked his use of the 100-person village statistic. Statistics like these drive the point home and carry more weight than opinions. Like Obama’s speech, the use of metaphors makes the speech entertaining and clearer. The only difference here is that the metaphors are more poetic, considering the topic is helping the world, as opposed to politics. In political speeches, metaphors are objective and have a clear meaning (e.g. to ridicule one’s opponent) whereas, a poetic metaphor like this can have more depth, take more time to fully understand, and are usually more artistic. This combination of solid facts and deep metaphors make the speech interesting.

Lastly, Martin Sheen gives his speech a personal aspect to it. Unlike Obama’s political speech, Martin Sheen used much more time discussing his personal life. This is again due to the difference in the genre of the speeches. Martin Sheen tells us about his parents, background and upbringing as an immigrant. This helps him relate to audience members who are also immigrants, which is highly effective in a country like Canada, where the majority of are immigrants. Sheen also talks about life experiences, like the Vietnam War, the assassination Martin Luther King Jr. and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. This, again, helps him to relate to anyone who might be old enough to remember these events, or probably more importantly in an audience for of teenagers, to share a bit of history with the younger audience.

To sum up this review, I think Martin Sheen speech was powerful and effective, even if he missed some small things that would have made it even better. His acting skills made the speech powerful and fiery, the speech itself was fascinating, and like most brilliant speeches, it has personal aspect to it as well.