Melissa Mayo
ENG 112 SA
Mrs. Russell
Spring 2008
Writer’s Memo
I chose to write this speech for Obama, because he has an in-depth focus and concern for America’s health care situation, and is the only one who specifically addresses the topic of obesity, which is what I think is the biggest contributing problem to people’s health nationwide. I picked health care to write about because it’s an important problem that needs to be dealt with, and obesity doesn’t have to be such a huge problem if people just put forth effort to try to stop it. There are plenty of separate problems when the candidates talk about health care, such as the many Americans that don’t have insurance, the high medical costs, the lack of prevention, research, etc. However, I felt that obesity tied all of those together, as well as representing one of the biggest epidemics in the U.S. today. In my speech, I’m trying to convince people that obesity is one of the biggest health problems today, and that it’s fairly unnecessary in most cases. It causes so many problems like other illnesses and disabilities that could lead to an early death, and that could all be fixed if people cared about their physical health more than they actually do. My audience that the speech is directed to is students at Miami, because most people need to be shocked into reality at the magnitude of the situation. In my speech I give plenty of statistics and proof that obesity is such a big problem. For the metaphor component of the speech, I thought it was hard to think up an overarching one. At the end of my second paragraph, I said how the nation is eating its’ way to a slow and early death which I thought could be the overarching metaphor, but other than that I just used small metaphors. In the group presentations we gave talking about different possibilities for our research, no one in the health care group talked about obesity. I thought that idea up on my own because it’s something I’m personally interested in/don’t understand. I found plenty of sources to prove that obesity is one of the biggest problems today with the same alarming statistics. I think memorizing the whole speech and delivering it easily will be hard to do. I also think being worried about be able to remember the entire speech word-for-word will definitely take away from the effectiveness of it.
