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Rhetorical Analysis Of Obama's Speech

Decent Essays

January 20th is an important day to all Americans; this is the day of the inauguration speech. Every four years the new president will announce their speech on this day. George Bush presented his speech 16 years ago, Barack Obama presented his speech 8 years ago and this year Donald Trump presented his speech. Each speech is expressed in their own style showing how the president is. For instance, Barack Obama uses numerous rhetorical devices, logic with emotions to perform a reassuring positive speech. In contrast to Donald Trump who lacked rhetorical devices but uses emotions to create a powerful straightforward speech. Both speeches revealed similar ideas yet were illustrated in very different ways. One way the essay differed is by the use of the rhetorical devices. Barack Obama included countless rhetorical devices in his speech. For example, he uses anaphora “on this day” which symbolizes that there is going to be a change on this day. He also uses imagery such as “Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms”. Imagery gets the audience thinking and visualizing such event. Obama incorporated metaphors and juxtaposition, these rhetorical devices gets the audience engrossed into the speech. Obama constructs his speech in this way to give hope and reassurance. Unlike Donald Trump who uses very few rhetorical devices. One rhetorical device that Trump uses is parallelism. For example, his first sentence in his speech was parallelism “

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