Letter From Birmingham Jail Rhetoric

Dr. Martin Luther King Junior in his piece, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” shows that refulgent writers transcend normal writing. King needed to convince a group of white town leaders that what they fundamentally believed and stood for was immoral. Throughout the letter, King evokes his passion through rhetoric, tone, and real-life experiences. Furthermore, King developed this passion from what he saw in Birmingham and other communities, as a result of racist leaders. In response, he writes with a style and structure to respond to these abhorrent front-runners. Mainly, the late doctor’s letter pushes, without crossing boundaries, fundamental social change. King knew that his opinion was not popular, thus he needed to write to the recipients

The ones that are effective and clear are his use of rhetoric, tone, and real-life experiences. Rhetoric describes the choice of words an author uses. An author can evoke different levels of passion, simply by what vocabulary he or she chooses. Therefore, by reading King’s, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one can gather his rhetoric as evoking a strong passion for change. His word choice is stark and strong. King used words in the following quote to connect his current issue to one of the past, “We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’ and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungry was ‘illegal.’ It was ‘illegal’ to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.” (King). When talking about the cruel actions of white people against African-Americans, he uses words associated with crime. Through this, he shows his audience that when he says these acts were inhuman, he means it. Additionally, King showed that the actions of the disaffected white leaders were not far from the actions of our world’s, prejudice

All three of these works together to show an author’s point. Additionally, they show a reader how passionate said author is. King’s letter is a good model for one to use. One reason is the letter worked in the end. Of course, it alone did not end segregation, but it is one piece that started the conversation. M.L.K. had a tough task. He had to try to convince a group of racist white leaders who have lived the same way for their whole lives. This is testament to how good of a writer King was. As said earlier, a respectable writer does not just put words on paper, a good writer goes beyond. In his use of imagery, he was able to stimulate the reader’s imagination. It would have been easy for King to just say times are not changing, and that he is tired of waiting. Yes, this would have delivered the point, but it would not be enough to show the recipients that what they stood for was wrong. We can collect that writers know their audience and use that to their