obama election speech
Public Speaking Techniques: how to use repetition like Obama!
Barack Obama is an amazing example of what GreatBlackSpeakers.com is all about. He’s a black man with an incredible gift for public speaking, and the ability to electrify any crowd he speaks to. So how does he do it? That’s too big a topic for a short article like this one, but what we can do here is to present a little bit of the Obama magic.
“Yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can.”Does this sound familiar? Of course it does! This is the classic Obama election trail refrain, from speeches such as his concession speech after the New Hampshire Primary loss to Hillary Clinton. So what is going here? In this refrain, Barack Obama is demonstrating the power of repetition, as he does so often and with such great effect in his speeches.
Repetition is a key component of many famous inspirational speaker in history. Note that the repetition does not have to be the same thing three times in a row, as in the above quote. It might be the same thing repeated at different points in the speech, as with Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech from 1963 (actually, Obama does this with “yes, we can” as well).
Repetition is a great example of how Keynote motivational speaker speech differs from effective normal speech. In normal speech, we would very, very rarely repeat a phrase three times in a row. But in a speech, which is a more formal and stylized way of speaking, it can be very effective indeed. What it does is to emphasize what is to be made very clear to your audience. It’s easy to forget an element of a speech that is said only once, but it is almost impossible to forget an element that is repeated. For this reason, it should only be used for the ‘take-home’ message of the speech.
Finally, never forget the power of threes! When repetition is used in speeches, it should almost always be in sets of three, and not any other number. For some reason, sets of three are powerfully symbolic to humans in a way that two and four or more are not.
About the Author
Zander Smith
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Member of Speaker motivational group
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