Persuasive Techniques In Martin Luther King's Speech I Have A Dream

What persuasive techniques have made Martin Luther King’s speech ‘I have a dream’ so famous?

The speech by Martin Luther King ‘I have a dream’ is a well-known and regarded as one of the best speeches ever given. The key message of this speech is the gap between the dream of equality and the reality, and that all the people are created equally. While not the case in America at the time, King felt it must be the case for the future also. So he spoke very passionately and powerfully about this issue on 28th of August 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Martin Luther king used several persuasive techniques in his speech, such as imagery, simile, symbolism, metaphor, anaphora, irony and emphasis.
The rhetorical device ‘Anaphora’

The audience's role in realizing the difference between what is said and what is normal or expected is essential to the successful use of irony. “bad check” is an example for it. When the King mentioned the “bad check”, he meant that the white people in America had abused Negroes for a long period and did not give them the deserved respect and justice. King spoke to the hearts of his listeners rather than to the heads. His choice of words were very emotion evoking and powerful, for example in “One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land”, the words like “Negro”, “languished”, “exile in his own land” stirs up an emotion the hearts of the

King started his speech by mentioning the great American ‘Abraham Lincoln’, “a great American whose symbolic shadow we stand today”. The words “symbolic shadow” is a visual imagery that he used to signify the former president Abraham Lincoln, it means that this great person is still in the hearts of the Americans. He used imagery in the speech numerous times, “beacon light of hope”, “flames of withering injustice”, “valley of despair”, “red hills of Georgia” and “oasis of freedom and justice”. The main purpose for Martin Luther King to use imageries in his speech was to help get his message across the audience in a language that is extremely powerful, vivid and very clearly visualised. He used some words to create visuals in our minds that help us to interpret his speech in the way he view it. “Red hills of Georgia”, “red” represents the blood, indicating pain, sorrow and injustice and Georgia symbolizes