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Encounter With Martin Luther King Rhetorical Analysis

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In reading the passage “Encounter with Martin Luther King Jr.”, it shows a very important moment in Maya Angelou’s life. In the passage, Maya Angelou does not include much of diction or sensory details. Even though these two characteristics are missing, she has a strong grip on characterization of both Martin Luther King Jr. and herself while the dialogue is also well written. The diction in her passage is lacking. In the passage, Maya Angelou does not use powerful and strongly meaning words. Like in the sentence “Birds of a feather and all that, but I took a chance and told him Bailey was in Sing Sing.” (271), Maya Angelou is simply stating what she just said. She could have expanded on this sentence and used diction to provoke an emotional response to the reader. A more meaningful sentence would be: (Birds and feather and all that, but I took courage and told him a secret that I had. That Bailey, my only brother was in Sing Sing.) If used properly, diction should let the reader get deeply concerned about the book and feel emotion in it. …show more content…

The sensory details allows a reader to be able to imagine themselves in the passage actually sitting there and is watching the scene happen like the memory was abstracted from their mind and put into a pensieve which is something you can see memories in Harry Potter. In the passage, most of the sensory details are just abstract sight details or sound of what they have spoken without any further detail. For example, “He dropped his head and looked at his hands.” (271) could be described more. An example sentence that she could have done was: (He frowned and looked down at his hands obviously depressed, seeming like he was discussing to himself about what to

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To start, Dr. King’s use of metaphors allows his audience to understand his viewpoint better. Since the founding of the Americas in the late 1400s, slavery was a problem; until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. Then the segregation of African Americans and White Americans started. In his essay, Dr. King uses the metaphor “America has given the Negro people a bad check, which came back marked “insufficient funds” (46). King uses this metaphor to emphasize the treatment of African Americans in America.

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On example of this critique can be seen in Maya’s meeting with Mrs. Bertha Flowers. Angelou presents the older black woman as a direct opposite of young Maya, stressing that Mrs. Flowers rules both her words and body. “She had the grace of control to appear warm in the coldest weather, and on the Arkansas summer days it seemed she had a private breeze which swirled around, cooling her” (Angelou 77). Mrs. Flowers makes Maya proud to be black, and claims that she is more beautiful and “just as refined as whitefolks in movies and books” (Angelou 79). Although Maya begins to respect and admire the black female body, the white body still provide her standard for beauty, and Angelou pokes fun at the literary writing that whitens Maya’s view of Bertha Flowers and

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