Rhetorical situation

Sender

The sender of the preface of Becoming is Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the US. Michelle Obama is the wife of Barack Obama, the former President of the US. She was born in 1964, was raised in Chicago, and graduated from Princeton and Harvard, both famous American universities. Obama is African American, and she calls attention to her ethnicity and the prejudice she has met, for example noting that some called her an “angry black woman” (l. 29).

In the preface, Obama mentions the different roles she has adopted during her life. For instance, she is not only the former First Lady of the US but has also been “a lawyer” (l. 10), “a vice president at a hospital” (l. 10), and “the director of a nonprofit” (ll. 10-11). Obama also mentions that, although being First Lady is “a job that’s not officially a job” (l. 14), it has granted her the opportunity to reach out and share her ideas and beliefs, more than any of her other previous jobs. Obama also talks about her personal roles: "I’ve been a bride, a stressed-out new...