WHAT FORMULA FOR PERSUASIVENESS OF SPEECH BY FORMER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA IN HANOI?

Abstract

The three-day offcial visit of the US president to Vietnam on May 2016 has received countless discussions of local people as well as articles on multimedia, many of which are online and either sound excessively complimentary, or deny potential contributions of this major political event. We have conducted a case study from perspectives of Public Speaking, Psychology and International Studies to discover a formula for persuasiveness of the speech: What powers the speaker has, how the speaker influences the audience’s emotion and how the speaker argues. In the world of multimedia and multidimensional information, our research would result in some practice-oriented strategies for both rhetoric science and media literacy. Admiration or criticism should be less emotional, trendy and crowd-driven. It should be more objective and scientifc instead.