This speech wasn't a major departure from Le Guin's preferred subject matter. Her reputation as an excellent science fiction author tends to undersell the amount of latent cultural activism that li...

One of the ways Le Guin likes to get a point across is to use parallelism, which is the use of components in a sentence that are grammatically the same (or similar) in their construction, sound, me...

What better way to compare two things, than to do it directly? By using similes, Le Guin doesn't beat about the bush when trying to make a point:That's why we are all wearing these twelfth-century...

Right in the beginning of her speech, Le Guin tells a very obscure Greek quip: I know there are men graduating, and I don't mean to exclude them, far from it. There is a Greek tragedy where the Gre...

One of the most striking aspects of Le Guin's speech is her ability to write in simple words that have really deep, philosophical impact. Maybe it's her background in poetry, but she has a way of w...

Ursula K. Le Guin isn't a man-hater. Far from it. But she did need to find a way to describe the negative aspects of certain types of men to whom she was referring, without naming names. That's whe...