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Rhetorical Devices In I Had A Dream Speech

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In the speech “I Had a Dream” the speaker Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks to the crowd of his own kind and explains how they are not treated equally. During the occasion of the speech, African Americans were treated poorly by the white people. The major influence of this speech was to help persuade his people to not give up their fight for an equal chance to be as equal as any human being. In every line that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks, he discusses the changes that were slowly happening and how his people must not give up. His tone is strong with the feelings of hope he has for the future. In a hope that they will achieve the freedom they have been wanting since their enslavement. The words that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, he appeals to all three logical appeals to catch his audience’s attention and appeal: ethos, logos, and pathos. He uses imagery of what happened in the past to appeal to pathos to help those who want to help the colored people to understand why the african americans shouldn’t be treated any less than …show more content…

Martin Luther King Jr. began, most of them started of similar for example he used the phrase “ I Had a Dream”. That phrase had the most impact for his whole speech. The anaphora “ I Had a Dream” was a rhetorical appeal to help other people be drawn to the powerful words he spoke after that phrase. In some of his sentences of his speech, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr included multiple allusions to help bring more feeling to his words. One anaphora includes “ Let us not wallow in the valley of despair” which is a biblical reference for Psalms 23. For his starting sentence he mentions The Gettysburg Address with “ Five score years ago..” Most the speech includes multiple anaphoras. One the other most memorable is where he referenced “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” to help give the people some imagery of the future where everyone will be treated with respect and not judged by the colour of their

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