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Barack Obama's Speech 'Back To School'

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Back to school The road to success isn’t easy and everybody has experienced failure at one point in their life, but what defines you isn’t how many times you fail, it’s how you react to the failure that does. You have to take responsibility for your own decisions and your own life, the world doesn’t owe you success, you have to work hard for it. Being hardworking and therefore experiencing success is a central theme in the speech “Back to school” spoken by Barack Obama on September 8, 2009. The topic of the speech is that children and teenagers has to take school seriously and work hard to achieve success, it is easy making up excuses but they will only drag you down. Furthermore, it is about taking responsibility of yourself and knowing …show more content…

“We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit school- you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.” (P. 8, line 62-64). In the above quote Obama uses patriotism to try to persuade the students, it gives the impression that if they don’t do well in school they will fail everyone, including the country as a whole. Additionally, he says “we” and “you” a lot which sets up to parallel sides and the direct language where he refers directly to the audience causes him to influence their opinions. Obama also makes use of examples of other successful who have had trouble in life but still managed to fight through the problems and achieve success. “I’m thinking about Andoni Schultz, from Los Altos, California, who’s fought brain cancer since he was three. He’s endured all sorts of treatment and surgeries, one of which affected his memory, so it took him much longer – hundreds of extra hours- to do his school work. But he never fell behind and he’s headed to college this fall.” (P. 9-10, line 97-100) This quote is one of the examples Obama uses and it

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