The First Persuasive Speech By Barack Obama's Speech

The first persuasive speech analyzed is a speech by Barack Obama. On the 1st of October a shooting took place at a community college near Roseburg, Oregon, causing 10 deaths. Obama, who is in his last term as president, prepared a speech to speak about this tragic event. In this speech Obama uses a clear structure to convince the audience of his standpoint, Obama achieves this through using crisp and declamatory language in order to iniate action of his audience, and to express his bitter disappointment.

Obama starts off his speech with a fairly standard opening sentence, except for one word, namely the word “another”. Obama purposefully chose this word to express his anger to audience. Obama immediately tries to express his disappoinment to the audience that these shootings take place so often. So, in the first sentence of his speech, Obama’s tries to get across his main point of the speech. Obama is annoyed by the fact that these shooting somehow have become routine. It is an idea that runs through the whole speech.

At the start of the second paragraph, Obama uses sensuous language by using words like mums, dads and children. People will be able to identify themselves with the situation, and this creates solidarity and empathy/sympathy. This is important in order to get his message across, because first Obama has to convince his audience of his standpoint before he can move on to the next step. Obama goes on to give some general information about the situation, and