Obama's Back to School Speech!

• He wears a suit and tie, indicating that he looks at this as a formal event. He is taking it seriously and wants his audience to know that as well.
• He waves and smiles to the students/staff as he walks in. This puts him on a closer level to the students-he isn't trying to be superior to any of them. This makes him more like he's just one of them.
• He uses emphasis on the word "great" when he says, "It is great to be here", showing he's excited at this opportunity.
• He increases his ethos when he lists some of the students responsibilities (tests, sports, etc.) because he is relating to them. He knows what the average American student goes through everyday!
• Throughout the entire speech, Obama uses a lot of parallelism and anaphora to emphasize his points. He says, "You've got to wonder, you've got to question, you've got to explore", "You'll be the ones leading our businesses and leading our government, you'll be the ones making sure are next generation gets what they need to succeed, you'll be the ones that are charting the course of our unwritten history."
• He pauses multiple times throughout his segment of the girl who taught herself chemistry and is now working with cancer researchers. This really made her story sink in and showed the significance of how hard she worked, and shows how everyone has the potential to do the same.
• He says, "More than sixty percent of the jobs in the next decade will require a highscool diploma. More than sixty percent." He repeats "sixty percent", and uses inflection when he says it, pointing out the importance of earning a highscool diploma.
• He talks about how the proportion of young people with a degree in America has dropped and says, "We now rank sixteenth. I don't like being sixteenth. I like being number one." His inflection here emphasizes the change of our ranks and how he cares about getting the ranks back up.
• Throughout the entire speech, he has slight hand gestures. They don't really seem planned. They are maybe more of a nervous habit/something he's doing subconsciously.
• He had a few "uuhs" and "aaands", but it didn't really bother me for some reason. To me it just made him seem more real. He wasn't robotic and it didn't sound like he was just reading off of a piece of paper!
• I noticed his sentences usually start at a slightly higher pitch, then tend to get lower as he finishes each sentence. I think this helps him to emphasize cause and effect or to compare/contrast things.