Throughout the past couple of weeks we have been instructed to read a number of speeches ranging from ancient speeches to modern speeches. We read over and watched many famous speeches including Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”, Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, and Russell Wilson’s 2016 commencement speech. One thing we see in these speeches is that even though all the speakers have a variety of goals, a variety of audiences, and use a variety other methods to get their point across, they still use many of same tactics within their speeches to grab the audience’s attention.
To begin with we see examples of the modes of persuasion in every speech. The modes of persuasion include ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is a way of persuading
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Logos is the way you persuade an audience by using reasoning and facts. While not every speech may contain or even need all three modes most speeches contain at least one of them.
When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech there was a problem with racism in the United states and he had one goal in mind; to end racism, discrimination, and segregation in the United States. He knew that his audience was going to consist of people who were going to agree with him and people who weren’t going to agree with him. Because of that he had to use a variety of methods to get his point across to both sides effectively. The methods he used that stood out most to me were ethos, pathos and logos. During his speech he uses ethos by quoting reliable sources such as President Abraham Lincoln, the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. In one of the first lines in his speech he says, “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” (King, 1963). In this line he is already using ethos. By addressing a past president of the United States he lets us know that he is using a very credible source and by saying that he signed the emancipation