Barack Obama's Speech Techniques

In this essay I will be analysing three extracts of speech by Barack Obama.   Some political leaders have the ability to influence their audience, leaders who fire up the rest of us, Barack Obama is one of them. Like Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, Obama speaks in the uplifting rhetoric of hope. He is the leader people want to believe in. The citizens of the United States of America are bombarded by bad news, the credit crunch, a housing slump, an economic slowdown but they are eager to hear something positive. Inspiring leaders like Obama acknowledge the situation but also remind people of reasons to be optimistic. Barack Obama is undoubtedly a speaking phenomenon.

All successful speakers use the same simple techniques, and have been doing so at least since they were first taught by the ancient Greeks. What makes outstanding speakers stand out is the frequency with which they use them. At its simplest, the more use made of these techniques, the more impressed audiences will be.

In Obama’s Chicago speech Ann Nixon Cooper,   the 106-year-old black voter was picked out by him as embodying the spirit of his election victory. She was born in 1902, a time that   Obama described as “just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky, when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons—because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin.” As he marked the moment of his historic victory, Barack Obama chose Cooper as the lens through which to tell the story of America. He tied her personal story to the nation’s history. This is an example of how Obama uses rhetorical devices, he has used it to evoke an emotional response in the audience.

From the introduction of the speech one can clearly see that the tone of the speech is inspirational. The speech is about change, reaching for a higher purpose and uniting to solve the problems in America.Obama uses the unity word “we”...