Kessie Cetinel Assignment 4 08.01.2008
Obama’s announcement for President
Barack Obama’s classical rhetoric has its own powerful source, kept alive in the traditions of African-American preaching and other great rhetoricer of our time like Martin Luther King. It’s clear that this type of rhetoric is intended not to sway our minds but to lift our hearts. Obama’s announcement for president is also a good example of the above-mentioned. The whole speech has a read threat, giving the receiver a feeling of reliability and security. The receiver don’t have to belong a special group or a certain race to vote for Obama. He don’t divide people, but gather them together under one unit, with a good effect on the receiver. He has been praised for his language skills, and many critics accused Obama for taking language lessons. In this speech he uses his known ‘skills,’ and it works, he never talks about himself and the american people as it was two groups, all of his sentences is either ‘we’ or ‘our,’ which again makes him more believable. The topic of the speech is America - how they are ‘one nation’ and how unity conquers everything. He uses different kind of rhetorical elements to make his speech trustworthy and one of them is American civil religion, one of the less implicit examples are when he’s about to finish his speech and says ‘That beneath all the differences of race ans religion, faith and station, we are one people’ - he gathers the receiver under the same values of good men and good americans. He also uses a reference to the Manifest day when he says ‘..for businesses that will serve as a model for the world.’ - which shows us in his believe in America being a role model for the rest of the world.
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Teacher Reviews
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There are lots of observations made about the techniques used and the references to rhetoric devices are good. To improve, the explanations need to be linked to the speaker and his purpose. 4 Stars
