ONE IMAGE, ONE MINUTE EXAMPLES

This is a timed speech, so stay within one minute.

Your general purpose is to inform. Tell your audience something about the image that isn’t obvious.

Your specific rhetorical purpose is to alter perception. Tell your audience one thing that changes how they
interpret the picture.

EMAIL your image to 1image1minute@gmail.com

You do not need an elaborate story or lots of research. Here are some examples of what other students have
presented. Don’t be intimidated! These are three of the best ones from the past two years:

EXAMPLE 1

Summary of Speech (this isn’t the outline, just a synopsis of what the student said.)

The horizontal lines in these figures are all the same length,
but they don’t look equal. This is the Müller-Lyer illusion,
which is used in psychology to demonstrate the ways that our
perceptions and brains play tricks on us.

I don’t care about the history or theory behind this image –you
can Google it if you want to- but I keep it as background on my
laptop to remind me to be skeptical about what I see, hear,
and read.

Yvette Hatwell / Research Gate

Works Cited

“Müller-Lyer illusion.” Research Gate, https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mueller-Lyer-illusion-A-The-

classical-stimuli-B-The-stimuli-proposed-by-Rudel-and_fig4_8588276. Accessed January 25, 2019.
 EXAMPLE 2 (Again, this isn’t the outline, just a short recap of the speech).

Summary of Speech

(I concealed the face in this picture and left out some words from the text.. You don’t have to do this, but since
I am reusing the picture, I decided it was necessary to protect the child’s privacy).

This looks like an ordinary, everyday picture of a kid on a

swing. And in some ways, it is. But what you can’t see is how
hard it was for ____, who is ___ years old, to get to this
moment.

I spent the summer after graduating from high school caring

for __, who has autism. It was hard for him to get used to a
new person, and even harder for him when his mother left
him alone with me.

Autism makes it hard for kids to adapt to change, and they

can’t express their feelings with words. Sometimes, they
throw tantrums because they are frustrated, scared, or mad.
At first, ___’s tantrums were so extreme that I was afraid
that he would hurt himself or me. When they ended, he
would rock back and forth, or his mother would rock him
until he was calm.

I was sure that he would like the motion of being in a

swing. But first, I had to earn his trust. I had to do the
same things in the same order every day for a month
before he would let me make tiny changes like walking to
the front door. After a while, I could open the door. A
few weeks later, he would go outside with me. By the end
of the summer, he trusted me enough to get into the
swing. The smile on his face means everything to me.
 EXAMPLE 3 (The student who presented this picture researched it online; that’s not required)

Summary of Speech (Again, this isn’t the student’s outline, just a summary of what they said.)

This photograph was taken by a famous photographer,

Dorothea Lange, during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Lange usually took precise notes of her pictures, but was
exhausted at the end of a long trip taking pictures for the
Federal Resettlement Agency. She titled this image “Migrant
Mother, Nipomo, California, and wrote that the woman in the
picture had seven children, and was stranded because she’d
sold the tires from her truck for food, and couldn’t earn
money because the crop she was picking had been frozen
due to cold weather. Lange included the picture in her gallery
exhibition of Depression photographs, and it became an
iconic image, anthologized in textbooks, and eventually
depicted on a stamp.

The woman in the photograph was named Florence Owens

Thompson. She lived from 1903 to 1983, and eventually had ten
children. She married a hospital administrator after World War
Two, and lived a
Dorothea Lange, "Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California"
comfortable, upper-middle
class life. She told a reporter that Lange had mixed her up with someone
else, or
embellished the story that went with the photograph, because
she had six children at the time, and never owned a truck or
tires.

For 40 years, no one knew her name, but a reporter found her
and interviewed her in the 1970s. Thompson received no
royalties from the picture, which she felt was unfair, and she did
not like being reduced to an anonymous symbol of poverty. Since
then, people from other iconic photographs have been found,
and their stories and identities are not ignored.

Works Cited

“Florence Owens Thompson.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Owens_Thompson.

Accessed September 10, 2018.