Last week President Barack Obama gave a speech at a high school in Nashville, Tennessee on the topic of education and reform. He spoke at this particular high school to commemorate it's students and faculty on their recent achievements in expansion of their curriculum, as well as to discuss recent and upcoming changes in the education nationwide. For this speech, he altered his language to accommodate his audience, he used suitable emotional appeal to create a connection, and inserted his credibility on discussed matters.

As any proper formal address begins, Obama begins by recognizing and congratulating some of the prominent people who were in attendance. Immediately following the opening remarks he comments on a recent loss in the community and provides condolence: "But I also recognize the past couple days have been hard and have tested people's spirits. Some of you lost a good friend. So I wanted you to know that Michelle and I have been praying for all of you and the community." This is his first apparent attempt at associating with his audience, to make them feel his compassion for their individual school and to create a rapport between himself and his listeners. This type of emotional appeal to an audience is referred to as pathos, and it is incorporated throughout this speech as a way to maintain a connection. In an attempt to relate to the audience on a more personal level, Obama tells a personal anecdote of his life growing up. He was raised by single mother and encountered many difficult struggles. The purpose of this story is to encourage listeners to empathize with him, and to provide them with an example of the infamous "rags to riches" tale. Modern society is infatuated with this story of being born with nothing, and working hard through the lifetime to become extremely successful. By telling this story, he emphasizes the first point of national educational reform, that every young person in America should be provided with the opportunities to make a better life for him of herself. The idea is to make his audience feel powerful emotions about this topic, so that they adopt and encourage this concept for him.

The writing process requires imagining the ideal audience, in order to create an appeal to their interest, grab their attention, and display your points. For this speech, the majority of the audience are high school students. Generally, most teenagers are not entirely informed of recent government legislation and politics. This means that a presidential address intended for young adults should be simplified in political terminology and interesting enough to hold their attention. Obama attempts to do this by incorporating small jokes and captivating emotional stories throughout his speech. His first joke, "Now, what I was going to say right at the top was the State of the Union is cold" was met with a lack of laughter or response, perhaps because the audience might not have understood the content of his political joke. However the rest of his jokes, most of which were impromptu, were received with positive laughter and struck the audience with his tone of light heartedness and open thinking, particularly when he stated "I'm not very different than a lot of the students who are here, except probably I was more irresponsible." Obama is trying to connect with the students, explaining that he was a teenager once and committed irresponsible behaviors just like they do. He makes another joke laughter on about a program offered at this school, that allows you operate a 3D printer and work your very own airplane. He keeps the mood light by joking: "That's pretty cool. I didn't get my own plane until I was 47 years old." Obama references the perks of holding presidential office, while also reminding everyone that he does not believe he is superior to them, and is still impressed with such a luxurious commodity.

For an audience to respect or believe a speaker, the speaker must have ethos. Ethos, which means credibility, can created in three ways, borrowed, situational, and textual. Textual ethos is credibility from experience, credentials, or accomplishment. Obama incorporates textual ethos into his speech when he refers to his Presidential State of the Union saying, "In my speech Tuesday night, I laid out an agenda where we need to grow our economy for everybody, we need to strengthen the middle class, we've go to make it easier for folks to work their way into the middle class - an opportunity agenda that has four parts." He is using his past childhood experiences and political knowledge to address where the issues lie, and how he intends to stop them based on his expertise. Obama also incorporates situational ethos into his speech, which is credibility due to reputation or authority. He states, "When I came into office, we took a financial aid system running through the banks that was good for the banks but wasn't good for the students. We reformed it, providing billions more dollars to millions more students. And now we've got more young people graduating from college than ever before." This statement explicitly refers to how he entered the presidential term, and what he's done since then to make changes he thought needed to be made. He indicates how much influence and authority he has to change the systems American's utilize everyday.

Presidential speeches have always been heavily criticized, especially by members of the opposing political parties. Every president, however, must realize that it is not possible to please everyone, regardless of political party affiliation. It is important that they look past this aspect of criticism when preparing speeches, and focus not on pleasing politicians, but on the content of their address and how it will be received by the intended audience. Obama's goal of congratulating this high school on their accomplishments, and reiterating his notions of education reform and improving America take precedent. This speech written in a way that sufficiently met the needs of this particular audience and was delivered well enough that it most likely fulfilled it's intentions.
