Blog #2

After reading Obama’s speech several times, I finally decided where I stand on the arguments he made, and how he made them. When I read the chapters of the book I feel like I became an expert at analyzing. Obama uses many rhetorical devices to appeal to the audience. The audience he was speaking to though, was a very close-minded group of people.  The majority of Obama’s speech seemed to be correlated with a pathos and ethos approach. They refer to his campaign and how he used “hope” as a campaign slogan. Hope itself is an emotion that connects directly to the pathos approach. Pathos is shown when he used logos to state a fact that the biggest separation in our country is of those who do and do not attend church. Ethos, Logos, and Pathos, all seemed to be intertwined in some way. One device will be used to enhance another. His entire speech is on a topic of religion and politics itself. Religion and politics both fall under the category of ethos. They both have a certain set of ethnic responsibilities. Obama relates his speech to his own personal life and what he went through. This is appealing to pathos and the emotion of the attendees. There is a greater amount of ethos and pathos used in his speech, but he uses logos to back up his statements.