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Roy Peter Clark I Have A Dream Speech Analysis

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Racism has been an important issue that plays a huge role in today’s society. In Roy Peter Clark’s article “Why it worked”, he expressed his views on Barack Obama’s speech “A More Perfect Union”. Also comparing it to Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In Obama’s speech he discussed the constitution and racial segregation in America, and the comments made by Reverend J. Wright, his former pastor. He also tells a little about his racial background. He briefly addresses the issues he finds with racism, and focusing on the important main goal of unity in America. Obama stated many things in his speech, which Clark states related to four rhetorical strategies: The power of allusion, parallelism, the “two-ness” of texture, and autobiography. Therefore, making his speech very influential to Obama getting his point across. Before analyzing Obama’s speech, Clark stated a very famous paragraph that was written by W.E.B DuBois. Using this quote gave the readers a sense of the main idea, which was about racism. This helped to further improve the quality of Obama’s topic and support the points he was about to make. Then goes to give a brief information about Obama’s speech. He then began with his four rhetorical strategies, starting with allusion. He compared Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech with Obama’s …show more content…

Which bring us to the next rhetorical strategy, parallelism. Some of the parallelism used in Obama’s speech such as “…we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction.” (Pg. 688) makes the reader feel a sense of emotion from the writer and get an overview of the past. It allows them to be more engaged and gives them something to relate to. Which in this case, lead to a better approach of Obama getting his audience to interact and connect with him, and helped to put forth his

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