More handpicked essays just for you.
Rhetorical speech analysis of "i have a dream" speech
Rhetorical speech analysis of "i have a dream" speech
Rhetorical devices used in mlk speech
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Though all of the rhetorical methods are fascinating, the most important aspect is how they relate to each other and the influence they create. As the structure of “I Have a Dream” is very important to its success, King carefully tries to relate all of his rhetorical methods with his structure. For example, part of King’s structure is intended to make the viewer have bad feelings about racism. To make this happen, King utilizes the rhetorical method of pathos along with metaphors and other rhetorical types and schemes to make the viewer feel sympathetic for the blacks. Also, King wisely chooses the rhetorical methods in his essay in order to make them fit with the structure.
Martin Luther King was a very powerful speech writer, as well as great at getting the point across through paper. In two of his most famous works of art, “I Have a Dream” and “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” he uses many different types of writing tools. Some of these writing tools include, analogies, rhetorical questions, and repetition. Some tools are only used in one or the other because it either wouldn’t make sense, or it would bring down the strength of the words within the work. The use of analogies is very common in his work.
King inspired millions to change the situation they were in and end discrimination with his emphatic diction. Unbeknownst to many, allusion was one of King’s most powerful and persuading forms of rhetorical devices in his, I Have a Dream,” speech. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” is guaranteed to both black men as well as white men, was a phrase spoken by King
Rhetorical and literary devices has been utilized to persuade an audience throughout history. In Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Frederick Douglass’ “Address to the Massachusetts Anti-slavery society” speech, they articulate the injustices the black man has experienced over the years by exercising allusion and anaphora. King and Douglass, both civil rights activist, desire action from society; they seek true equality for their black brethren. King and Douglass use allusion to create a recollection in the minds of their audience in order to reinforce their intents. King states, “five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation” referring to Abraham Lincoln.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the biggest players in the Civil Rights Movement and he wrote/spoke two famous works, his “I have a Dream” speech and his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” of which both had a different purpose and audience. He used different rhetorical techniques depending on the purpose and the audience that he is targeting with the work such as Logos (Logic) and Pathos (Passion). In Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech his purpose is to encourage people to keep peacefully protesting and not to lose hope or start getting violent. The audience that he speaks to are Civil Rights supporters that want equal rights for all races.
Deluged with remarkable linguistics, King’s rhetoric wholly epiphanized and unified a country that had been stricken with unrest by war and hate and thus became the epitome of the March on Washington and the summation of the Civil Rights Movement Summarized Speech The speech encapsulates the desire to remain equal among the exalted American people, those of White color. At the outset King utilizes a policy signed 100 years ago as reference to a declaration of freedom that has only been contorted to produce new boundaries on freedom;
MLK Speech Devices In Martin Luther King Junior’s “I Have a Dream” speech, many rhetorical devices are used to convey the message that he is trying to get across. Two of these devices are symbolism and repetition. Symbolism is used extensively throughout the speech. One example of this is in the line “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’.”
On September 15, 1963, a couple of weeks after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, four girls die in a bombing at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist church. Three days later, King delivered a speech at their funeral. In his eulogy, King claims that although the children were “unoffending, innocent, and beautiful . . . victims,” they were also “martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity” who “died nobly.” The speech shows another perspective of King’s leadership and how he links American political ideas to Christian religious ideas.
Dr.Martin Luther King Jr was a leader during the 1960’s who believed in peace. President Abraham Lincoln, a leader that broke the rules of society and freed the slaves. In the “I Have a Dream, Dr.Martin Luther King JR” speech and the “Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln” both leaders spoke out to talk about freedom and inequality. That was not the purpose, however, the purpose of these two speeches was to inspire the listeners to come together. This paper will analyze both speeches and express how different rhetorical devices helped achieve the purpose.
During the era of the civil rights movements in the 60s, among the segregation, racism, and injustice against the blacks, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial to deliver one of the greatest public speeches for freedom in that decade. In Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech he effectively uses ethos, diction and powerful metaphors to express the brutality endured by African American people. Yet his most important method of reaching his audience, and conveying his enduring message of equality and freedom for the whole nation was his appeal to pathos. With these devices, King was able to move thousands of hearts and inspire the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Opening his speech Martin Luther King Jr. sets up his credibility with his use of ethos, referring to the Declaration of Independence saying, “This note was a promise that all men… would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life.”
“Let freedom ring.” Freedom is all something we all value in life; unfortunately, it wasn’t just handed to all of us. In “I Have a Dream,” Martin Luther King Jr. tries to convince all of America that everyone should be treated with equality. This address is very compelling because it uses tone, repetition, and allusion to convey a point using both compassion and power. The first paragraph references to the Declaration of Independence and our unalienable rights as Americans, trying to argue his point.
In paragraphs 16-24 he repeats the phrase “I have a dream.” This is an example of repetition. MLK also uses analogy in his speech in paragraph 4. In the text, King compares American civil rights to cashing a bad check. King compares the two to show how worthless the promise of African Americans civil rights is.
By using these rhetorical devices, King successfully inspired emotion in his audience and gave them hope for a possible bright future. We can see that Martine Luther King use several rhetorical devices within the speech to grab attention of the people who were engaged with the unjust oppression. First of all, in the beginning of his speech, he made a connection alluded to Lincoln’s speech ‘‘Five score years ago…’’ (Line 2.1, page1) this line referred to the Gettysburg Address, presenting by the United States president. King used it to enhance credibility primarily because of Lincoln’s high position related with civil rights.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an extremely impactful activist during the Civil Rights Movement that gave over 2,500 speeches in his lifetime. Of these speeches, his most popular is his famous I Have a Dream speech that he gave on August 28, 1963 in Washington, D.C. during the March on Washington. Even famous speakers like Martin Luther King, Jr. use persuasive techniques to appeal to the different sides of their audiences. In order to appeal to his predominately African American audience, Martin Luther King, Jr. makes reference to Abraham Lincoln and his granting freedom to slaves by signing the Emancipation Proclamation.
The “I Have a Dream” speech is well known throughout history to be one of the most famous speeches to be on the subject of civil rights. Throughout the entirety of “I Have a Dream”, Dr. King uses pathos more than logos. “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.”
