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I Have A Dream Speech Comparison Essay

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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the I Have A Dream speech and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address both have a common theme for the rights of freedom and equality. Both speeches also address the urgency to take action in people’s rights and have lots of impacted emotion to the audience. Both famous speakers use rhetorical devices in their speeches to grab their audience 's attention and create a sense of reaction and emotion. The purpose of this essay includes an example of the rhetorical devices that triggers an emotional response from readers/audiences. “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair,” says Dr. Martin in his speech of I Have A Dream. The repetition of ‘go back’ to these southern states where all the racism and criticism and the soul of the unequal freedom and inequality is most …show more content…

“...conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure…” Lincoln states that all men are created equally but since there is inequality, the nation is in a ‘great civil war’ for the freedom and how long the people can endure this. “...under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” There is repetition here as well and parallelism. The urgency here in the Gettysburg Address is to make changes and demand for a ‘new birth of freedom’ or else the nation will perish and fall apart. This creates a huge impact for the audience of emotion and to take action fast before we perish of the

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