President Bush’s address to the nation following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 was short, sweet, and to the point. He used various methods to address what had happened, who it happened to, and to convey his sympathies to the American public. Here, I will identify some of these methods, deduce them, and explain the difference between what was said, what was heard, and the intended implications spoken by the president. President Bush starts his address to the nation by saying “our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist attacks.” In this opening, he is setting the stage for the rest of his speech. It was intended to captivate and hold the attention of his intended audience. By opening his speech with this statement, he tells his audience that we, America, was attacked (an act of war) on purpose today, and by doing so; our way of life was also attacked. This is intended to bring Americans together and to share in this atrocity by implicating that it was not just those individuals who were victims of the attacks who were the intended targets, but it is all Americans whose lives will be forever altered by this event. He goes on to tell us that it was not an open act of war in that our military was not the ones who were attacked, but civilians, and he gives the public a scale in which to measure the devastation by indicating that there were thousands of “innocent” people who were directly harmed in these “evil, despicable acts of terror”. He then tries to get people to hold the image of planes flying into building as they listen and think about the events that have transpired, and then goes on to add details of burning and collapsing buildings and fires to give those who were not present an idea to picture what the after-math of the attacks was like. Now that he has gained the attention of his