Rhetorical Analysis Of President Obama's National Address

The definition of persuasion is the act of persuading someone to do something or to believe that something is true. Some students who are students in the American education system do not understand the purpose of hard work in school ,and do not try their best all the time because they feel that school is not important. President Obama gives a speech called the “National Address to America’s Schoolchildren” effectively convinces his audience that education is vital to a students life through the use of appeals to emotion, logic, and credibility in hopes that students learn to value their education and the opportunities that they have been provided by the American education system.

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Obama utilizes the audience’s sense of

He wants students to think that they can work their hardest for a couple of hours and succeed. Obama wants his audiences to feel motivated to know that they can do anything with hard work and determination because Shultz had brain cancer but since he worked hard he did well in school and is going to college,therefore there is no excuse for students to not try their hardest in school. The speaker also attempts to use students' sense of emotion to persuade students to be motivated about their education. Obama uses the students' internal emotion of hope to persuade them that if they have failed at anything in life they can always try it again. He does this by mentioning names like “J.K. Rowling the writer of Harry Potter who had her first book rejected 12 times.” He also does this by mentioning Michael Jordan, a hall of

Obama illustrates this to his audience when he connects the audiences school life with their outside of school life with Obama’s ultimate goal being to persuased the students to work harder in school.Obama makes this connection when he says “no matter what you do with your life, I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. Do you want to be a doctor or a teacher? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those things. You cannot drop out of school and drop into a good job. (Paragraph 13).” In this quote Obama effectively persuades the audience that school is vital to other things in life that don’t have anything to do with school. Obama uses logic to illustrate to students that not working hard in school and dropping out does not look good on a job application. Obama wants students to understand that if they don’t work hard in school and drop out they will not have a good job which could lead to problems later in life such as poverty and depression due to the job they have. The speaker hopes that his audience will acquire life skills in school such as hard work and problem solving that students can use outside of school. Later in Obama’s address, he makes another appeal to his audience’s sense of logical thinking in order to persuade students that hard