Rhetorical Devices In Letter From Birmingham Jail

Prejudice is a major issue that has dominated the society for years. Many have spoken up against this discrimination, making their voices heard over the views of numerous people. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights activist in the mid-1900s, spoke and acted strongly against injustice against African Americans. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he uses powerful and eloquent language to display an ardent desire to influence people’s judgments and to encourage others to join him in making the society one of equality and justice rather than one of bias and hatred.
Martin Luther King Jr. uses rhetorical strategies, purposeful word arrangement, and other literary devices to passionately express criticism against injustice. For example, inversion is the juxtaposition of the customary order of elements in a

He employs this at the beginning of a sentence about his rare yet overwhelming desire to speak up when he says, “Seldom do I pause…” to stress the first word “seldom,” emphasizing how infrequently he pauses to answer criticism. Another example of his influential language is his employment of ethos, which creates a feeling of credibility about the speaker. Telling the audience he has “the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference” helps the audience become confident in what they are hearing and leads them to consider his ideas. His use of ethos also increases their trust and aids them in believing what he says and paying more attention to it. He also uses logos, which is based on logical structure and uses facts and statistics, when he states that they “have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South” to reinforce his view that everyone should have justice and freedom and that he is not the only one in the equal rights movement. In addition, he makes a