Great Speeches

What compels an audience shifts over time, meaning yesterday's popular speeches might not go over the same way if delivered today. However, impactful campaign speeches across time share some qualities, including taking the audience seriously, inviting listeners to engage with or respond to presented materials, and using everyday, informal language. Additionally, US political candidates typically promote themselves in their speeches, an approach initially considered vulgar in Australia and Britain.

A rhetorical situation is a framework for analyzing speeches and their reception as a form of persuasion that seeks to influence audience action. According to this framework, understanding a speech's impact requires a deep understanding of its setting. This virtual "untextbook" by Atilla Hallsby, an assistant communications professor at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, provides examples of rhetorical situations and analysis using current and historical events.

NASA's Voyager 1 took this shot of Earth—a mere pixel—at the request of astronomer Carl Sagan as the probe was leaving the solar system on Valentine's Day 1990. Earth appears in the image as a "mote of dust" caught in stray sunbeams, soon to appear to be nothing at all, from Voyager's view. In the video, Sagan famously reflects on the smallness of our planet in relation to the "enveloping cosmic dark," calling on viewers to treasure the only home we've ever known.

In the spring of 2000, famous late night talk show host and comedian Conan O'Brien gave a hilarious, thoughtful speech to the graduating class at Harvard, where he graduated from in 1985. The speech has been noted ever since as a classic example of both wisdom and foolishness. Watch the 20-minute video here.

The highest awards in film are highlighted by the winners' speeches. While many give thanks to a list of colleagues, friends, and parents, some diverge into politics, extreme emotion, or goofiness. This incomplete list showcases the most memorable speeches in Academy Award history: from Joe Pesci's in-character six-word thanks, to Sally Fields' candid and humorous one—which inspired some misinterpretations. Learn more here.

The roots of "rhetoric" stretch back to ancient Greece, where early philosophers defined rhetoric as the art of winning the soul through discourse or the art of persuasion. Rhetoric and its proposed nature have since shifted, with more modern sources describing rhetoric as a natural byproduct of language, the intentional framing of discourse, or the study of how humans use symbols and language to carry out human activity.

On Sept. 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy set forth this argument for the effort to land humans on the moon’s surface, casting the Apollo mission in terms of historic human ambitions.

The US State of the Union speech is an annual event proposed by the country's Constitution and scheduled by its first president. President George Washington was the first to deliver such a speech, by nature of his office, limiting the inaugural "Annual Message" to 1,100 words and 10 minutes. Just 10 years later, the country's second president, John Adams, changed the nascent tradition, instead offering a written statement.

Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, wrote his famed Gettysburg Address on a train car. Actually, he had a version of it ready a few days before. Well, really, he came up with it on the spot. Rumors about the speech's creation abound. This 1909 article walks readers through evidence Lincoln's speech was carefully planned and written in Washington, DC (in pencil).

Like many practices handed down throughout the ages, the ability to enrapture audiences through oration is an art. And, like all arts, that means anyone can learn to do it well through practice. The first step to a good speech? Paying attention to the audience. Knowing the intended listeners of a speech and their expectations provides insights on how to connect with them.