ExpresstoSuccess.doc

Express to Success
---A Study of Barack Obama’s Presidential Victory Speech
Abstract:
Making public speech is a useful and convenience way to persuade the audiences or the hearers to agree with your idea or proposition. While making a successful public speech is a profound course. Learning from famous speech makers is a good way to improve the ability of making public speech. President Barack Obama is a well-known speaker who has made many famous speeches, especially his presidential victory speech. This article mainly talks about the study of this speech and conclude the worth-learning points from his speech. We learners, especially the Chinese, should keep the key points of making successful public speech in mind so that we can express ourselves to success.
Key words: public speech, Obama, words, sentences, audience
Ⅰ. Introduction
On November the 5th, 2008, Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of America, becoming the first black national leader in American history. On the evening, Obama addressed his victory speech in Chicago. The theme of Obama's victory speech is "change is coming to America" in response to the special period of US. The victory speech has made a big success that all the people in the USA are excited and thrilled. It is well-known that Obama is an articulate speaker so that every time when he is making a speech, he could triumphantly arouse the hearers’ enthusiasm and grasp their ears. That is a very significant reason that he wins the presidential election. So we can conclude that an appealing and evocative public speech is very important. Then Obama’s victory speech will be further analyzed to find out the quite something that he used.
Ⅱ. A general study of Obama’s speech
1. The particular use of words
Making a public speech is very different writing a report or other literary works. The speaker should keep in mind that he should select the most suitable words to express the feelings and deliver the information. When listening to a speech, the audiences hear and understand the information almost at the same time, while in literary works readers can read many times if the article is difficult to understand by reading once. So it is very important to avoid the obscurity expressions. Whether the speech is a success or a failure made by the speaker, the audiences are the judges. Their feedback and response is the evaluation criterion. So, in this case, speakers should make sure that every audience has made clear about what he is saying during the process of making a speech. The primate task for the speaker to pay attention to is the pronunciation and intonation. The most important thing come first is clear and accurate pronunciation, which requires the speaker pronounce words in a standard way, without swallowing the sound and abbreviation.
In Obama’s speech we find that he does not use abbreviation. For example, he uses “let us” instead of “let’s”, “I would not be standing here…” is used, rather than “I wouldn’t be standing here…” The less use of abbreviation reduces the difficulties of understanding and makes the whole speech more serious and formal.
In public speech, the use of personal pronoun is also very important because the different choice of personal pronoun means whether the relationship between the speaker and the audience is close or not. The most frequently-use is the first personal pronoun (I and We), but the second and third personal pronoun is not so frequently used in speech. The use of “we” can shorten the distance between speakers and listeners, leaving them in the same position, establishing a cordial relationship, winning the approval and support from listeners. In this speech, the frequent use of “we” can make the listeners realize that the president will firmly stand together with them in facing of future challenges coming from current severe economical crisis. In this case, listeners will be encouraged and give support to the new president with firm resolve. The second personal pronoun is also used in this speech, but not as frequent as “we”. The object in this speech is the American public; the president gripped the attention of his listeners, affirming that his being -elected can not be achieved without the listeners. As mentioned by the title, “This is your victory.”
2. The particular use of sentences
In terms of the main idea of the speech, it can be divided into five parts---celebration, thanks, challenge, history and hope. Those parts are developed naturally and connected with each other coherently, which serves for the unity of the theme.
According to statistics, there are 83 sentences and 2,067 words in Obama's Victory Speech. The length of sentences varies with the change of emotional state of mind of the Obama. The average length is 25 words per sentence, which is much longer than that of (8 words per sentence) of casual conversation. Here we have some detailed statistics to show the length of sentences in the speech. Totally, there are 20 sentences which have less than 10 words; 11 sentences with 10 to 15 words;7 sentences with 16 to 20 words;16 sentences with 21 to 30 words; 32 sentences with more than 30 words. But Obama does use too much long and complicated sentence to confuse his audience. In stead, some short sentences are very outstanding and persuasive which hold the audience’s attention immediately. For example, the most typical short but powerful sentence is “Yes, we can” which suggests Obama’s great confidence to the future goals. What is more, long sentences can express more complicated relation, and produce elegant, stately stylistic effect.
In this speech, composite sentences are very common, while simple sentences just account for a little part. Obama rarely uses “s” structure. Instead, he applied “of”, “that” and “who” to put the modifier part behind. By using postposition structure, he makes the content more precise and adds a sense of elegance and gravity to the speech.
Besides, all the sentences in the speech are statement without a few questions. Because the aim of speech is to deliver the message of “yes we can”, he utilizes affirmative tone to emphasize his and American people's confidence. The application of command also helps to enhance the interaction of the addresser and the addressees.
What’s more, in Obama’s speech, we could find various sentence types. Periodic sentence and Imperative Sentence are two typical types used in his speech. For example, In Obama’s speech, the first sentence is the periodic sentence----“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” The focus “tonight is your answer” is put at the end of the sentence, more powerful, creating a suspense and making his speech more attractive in the first place. The function of imperative sentences is to directly make appeals to the public, evoking their passions, letting them do as the speaker told them to do. In Obama’s speech, the usage of imperative sentences is remarkable characteristic. Obama used the pattern of “Let us…” five times among which four are used successively, making a parallel, and full of inflammatory.
3. The particular use of rhetorical devices
Another distinguish feature of Obama’s speech is that he uses rhetorical devices successfully. A rhetorical device of language is a technique that an author or speaker uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning with the goal of persuading him or her towards considering a topic from a different perspective. While rhetorical devices may be used to evoke an emotional response in the audience, there are other reasons to use them. The goal of rhetoric is to persuade towards a particular frame of view or a particular course of action, so appropriate rhetorical devices are used to construct sentences designed both to make the audience receptive through emotional changes and to provide a rational argument for the frame of view or course of action.
Repetition is used through the whole speech. For example, “…we rise or fall as one nation — as one people”; “This is our moment. This is our time.” There are also the repetitions of structure in this speech, where “It is the answer…”had been used for three times, and “Yes we can” had been used for seven times. By the use of repetition, the balance and the contrast of the sentence can be kept, which makes the sentence more vivid. Speech words are more impressive in form and full of rhythm in listening, which can strengthen the power of the speech. Obama’s repeated “Yes we can” further strengthened the future confidence of the public.
Besides repetition, parallelism is also making contribution to make the speech more impressive and powerful. For example, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” “I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president, too.” “…the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope.” “…she lived to see them stand up and speak out and reach for the ballot.” “There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair.” Theses parallelisms can be divided into sentence parallelism, word parallelism, and word phrase parallelism.
Ⅲ. The experience learned from Obama’s speech
1. The useful experience
From above, we can see that Obama is very careful in selecting the words and sentences in his speech so that he can reach expected effects. What can we learn from Obama’s speech?
Obama’s ability to move people through soaring rhetoric and appealing rhythms of his delivery is now the stuff of legends. Detractors often attribute the president’s strong popularity in large part to his oratorical skills, not his ideas. It is the president’s personae and sheer natural magnetism at work they insist, nothing more. The problem with the argument is that it assumes good communication skills are the same as good acting skills. It presumes that intent and belief by the speaker in what is said is irrelevant, and that, cynically, people can’t tell the difference. It’s that one assumption, that substance takes a back seat to style, that holds back many if not most executives from communicating effectively in public.
In fact, acting and presenting are not the same. In the real world, ideas and words have to align with what an audience knows or thinks they know about a subject and speaker. Contrary to popular notion, assuming audience ignorance or indifference of your own involvement is dangerous. In fact, what other reason is there in this day and age to expect others to leave their offices and devote valuable time listening to presentations or speeches, if not for the audience to “see for themselves” the relevance of both the speaker and what the speaker has to say. If the speaker really made no difference in our judgments, then all communication could take place out of each other’s sight or in written formats.
Therefore, we can make a conclusion from analyzing Obama’s speech that if we should keep four principles in mind. The first is to start with what you know. There will be times when you do not have or cannot address the full picture. Minimize discomfort through preparation and practice. Work to build your presentation or speech around those areas you are comfortable speaking about. If you are forthcoming about what you do know, your audience will understand if you do not have all the answers immediately. The second is that don’t speculate about what you don’t know. Being forthcoming does not mean taking a stab at addressing every possible concern or question on the topic, regardless of your expertise. Be clear on your purpose for presenting or speaking, and the value you bring on that topic to your audience. Don’t seek to lecture Seek to communicate. The third point is to be clear. We have mentioned this point above. And here the “clear” means not only the pronunciation should be clear but also being clear about the theme and the topic. Never leave an audience wondering what your position is, why they are listening to you or what you expect them to do with the information you’re giving them. Of all the things you could say about your topic, only choose the things that are relevant to your audience and that they need to know. The last point mentioned here is that remember that the audiences are hearing you but not reading. Write and speak “for the ear”, the way you normally communicate orally. Your audience cannot re-read your remarks, so seek to be understood the first time. Use a natural communication style, enunciating your words and using the vocabulary you’re comfortable with.
2. The advice for Chinese speech-makers
When making a public speech in English, we Chinese are usually affected by the traditional Chinese thinking style. The main problem is that the Chinese style speech is usually general and vague. Chinese tend to provide few details about position. The viewpoints they present are usually not adequately explained, exemplified, defined or supported. They often simply take a position or make a claim on an issue, and seldom elaborate or justify the point they are trying to make. Besides, the logical problem is the most explicit one in public speech; too many quotations and analogies which lack logic. People cannot speak coherently, logically or critically; thirdly, they use big, abstract and bloated words to impress audience. Thus, they produce a sort of “dry speech”; that is they either express superficial thoughts or their thoughts dry up quickly. Consequently, their arguments might easily be judged subjective.
It is believed that Chinese history and culture has deep influence on our cognitive thinking and it shapes our general style in English speech. However, when giving English speech, most audience comes from western countries, who are not accustomed to our general and vague style. For the western classical rhetoric, the audience would assess and interpret the persuasive messages in rational manner. Thus, the main objective of a speaker was to evoke rational thinking on part of the audience, so they would follow the line of argument presented to them and made judgment of soundness and validity. To achieve a good effect in speech, we need to develop extended discourse by providing logical reasons and good evidence. A speaker may reflect on how his or her personal experiences, memories, observations, facts and statistics related to a particular speech topic.