Name: Wong Tsz Yan Course: EECE 2720

Background

In 2009, the Arizona State University invited the current President of United States to
deliver a persuasive speech to their graduating class in a special occasion situation
(Graduate ceremony). Barack Obama, as the speaker, tried to achieve several goals
through his speech such as encouraging students to pursue passions in order to
contribute to a better world.

Audience

The target audiences were a class of graduates who aged around 22 years old
including both male and female. They all specialized in different areas such as
business and education while they come from different places with different cultures.
Obama’s speech is suitable for graduates from different professions because he had
made suggestions specifically for business, education, and so on. He cared about
graduates from different professions which have different knowledge on careers .

Additionally, these graduates could be seen as positive audiences because they

graduated from this university. They had a sense of belonging and were proud of
their university. They would be friendly and open to the speech such as applauded in
the video.

Audiences are egocentric and always pay more attention to what they want to know
or to those that are meaningful to them. Obama was aware that his target audiences
are a group of graduates who have not yet worked in the community. They were still
on the starting line which made them want to understand in what way they could
succeed in their future. The topic chosen by Obama could satisfy the appetize of its
majority audiences. For example, he suggested what a hallmark of real success is. It
is a commitment to different stakeholders and it ensured the university is inclusive
and diverse. This gave the audiences an ideas on how to succeed. With all other
similar pieces of ideas, audiences responded and were more willing to accept the
message.

The speech is closely related to audiences’ knowledge. Throughout the speech,

audiences responded by applausing and laughing. This showed that the audiences
had the basic knowledge to understand the content. For example, audiences may
suffer from the financial issues during the Great Recession in 2009.
 Context
Obama’s speech was organized in a motivational sequence : Attention, Need and
Satisfaction.

First, Obama started with a prevalent type of introduction in which he would like to
show his sincere thanks to the entire community. He then grabbed the attention of all
audiences while he was talking about his experience that he also needs to do a lot of
things for his family even being President of the United States. Consequently, the
audience would reflect and think why a successful person like Obama need to do a
lot of things which grab their attention and be curious.

Second, the body’s part are using the problem-solution pattern. Obama pointed out
that it was in time of extraordinary difficulty, for the nation and for the world. In 1990,
the whole world including the United States were suffering from the Great
Recession. The economy of the United States is in recession and has become the
worst they have ever seen. This crisis are the common problem that all audience
need to face and show the need to solves. Obama used this example to tell the
audience that the old attitudes, pursue fame and fortune are the root of this crisis
and persuade them to change their attitude, then their action to change the
community.

Language

Obama used ethos mode and used his opinion to persuade audiences. As the
current President in 2009, higher credibility of his speech about success because
people recognized Obama was a successful person. Moreover, Obama applied
rhetoric to intensify the tone of his speech.
First, germination is used in the speech like “so can you ASU, so can you class of
2009. So can you” These sentences repeated the words “so can you” and attracted
audiences’ attention while strengthening Obama’s tone to highlight his main
message. Obama also used Anadiplosis such as “You've got no excuses. You have
no excuses not to change the world.” to persuade the audiences to change their
wellbeing in the future. At the end, Obama highlighted the main message again to
conclude and persuade the audience to change their belief.

https://www.apm-edu.com.tw/catalog-detail/ArizonaState/

https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-of-200709