Encounter With Martin Luther King Rhetorical Analysis

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.

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