Retorisk analyse af Barack Obamas præsidenttale

Rhetorical analysis of Senator Barack Obama’s Announcement for President

When delivering a speech, the use of rhetoric is extremely important. You have to think about who your audience is, what purpose your speech is going to have and so on. On February 10, 2007, Senator Barack Obama performed his announcement for president in Springfield. The speech was of great importance to his career, so he had to use his very best rhetoric abilities to capture the voters’ interest. In this essay, we will analyze Obama’s speech using the rhetorical pentagon, different rhetorical functions and at last evaluate his speech, to find out if his intentions succeeded.

As all speeches, Obama’s speech has a very clear function. If you look at the context of the speech, the function becomes very clear. The speech is Obama’s announcement for president; therefore, he wants people to vote for him. He is showing the audience all the good sides of him as well as what he can do for the country as president, because he needs to convince the audience that he is better than his competitors. Therefore, the function of the speech is to persuade the audience.

But who is the audience? The rhetorical pentagon can help us answer this, as we will address the different aspects: As we stated before the intention of the speech is to persuade the voters to vote for him. The writer is Barack Obama, who then was senator in Illinois, and who had went to college and law school. The readers are the American people who can vote. We can split the audience up in two: A primary audience and a secondary audience. The primary audience are the people who would already vote for the democrats. He is trying to persuade them to pick him as a candidate for the democrats. The secondary audience could be the rest of the voters, as he would want to look as good as possible for the whole country and get good press. The topic is mostly about Obama himself, but also about what a great country USA is, and what it can achieve if given the right leaders, and why he can make positive changes to the country. The circumstance is him having the possibility to step up from senator to president. The language he uses is overall modern and straight forward English, but he does use some effects that are typical for speeches: The sponsorship effect is very clear, when Obama tries to borrow some of Abraham Lincolns credibility. On page 3 line 35 - page 4 line 6, he tries to compare himself to Lincoln, and to put himself in the same spot as him. He tells the audience that he will use this successful man, as a role model for his politics.