Obama's Speech

• cadence: He lowers the pitch of his voice at the end of a sentence when he is trying to emphasize the point he just made. He does not do this when he is giving examples to prove his points.
• gestures: He waves after he is introduced to the audience, he points at the audience when he says  "you" or "now". In the middle of his speech it seems like he waves his hands in small circles because he doesn't know what to do with them.
• setting: The members of the audience that are used as the president's background are all kids, multi-cultural, and wearing suits or dress shirts. The president is speaking at a very successful highschool. All of these are beneficial to the president's message, but the expressionless and fairly bored faces in the audience are not.
• enunciation: He makes sure that he pronounces every word accurately, but he makes a few grammatical errors. He says "uh" and stutters several times. He says "ethics is about", "a non-for-profit", "you will be the one who are", and "got that algebra formula properly.".
• climactic order: He doesn't go through a long chain of events, instead choosing to skip straight from now (school) to the future (careers). Later on he places college and extra curriculars in the middle.
• repetition: He repeats thoughts of America's dependence on students, the importance of education, and the idea that "we" are counting on "you". He repeats the words "you", "future", and "education" a lot to emphasize his point.
• parallelism: He compares his ethics class to the presidency, and he compares classes in general to different careers.
• figurative language: Holy guacamole, he uses a ton! Just to start with he states that tests and projects are "just around the corner", students should "color outside the lines" (whatever that means), students should look for subjects in "what makes you come alive" (Aren't we already alive?), students should start "expanding horizons", parents "love you to death", and in school "one hour you can be an author, the next hour, a scientist". It bugs me when he says "I met" or "I sat down with". He talks about the person who indroduced him, saying that he learned something about her when he sat down and talked to her, when he really only heard it from her indirectly in her introduction a few moments ago.
• eye contact: He spends equal amounts of time looking at the audience and looking at his notes. It seems like when he looks at his audience he looks into the distance, never daring to look into the front row.
• pauses: The largest pause was before... Twitter, which was used for a humorous effect (the audience laughed, but I didn't get it). The pauses in his speech were placed like the ones in MLK Jr.'s speech. He says "it is great... to be here." The pause in the middle makes you ask "Why is it, or what is great?". After the pause he answers your question with an obvious response.
• posture: He stands up straight, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and holds the podium.
• voice inflection: This is similar to cadence. His tone gets higher when he gives a command or makes a key statement, and goes lower when he illustrates his points.