Martin Luther King was the Leader of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

Authors Avatar

        

Martin Luther King was the Leader of the Civil Rights Movement in America.  He wrote and delivered his famous speech on the 8th of August 1963 on the subject.  This commentary will examine some of the language and rhetorical techniques that he uses in his speech, and how they allow the listener to picture and therefore understand his ideas.  I think that his techniques are very helpful to picture the ideas that he is speaking about.

        His language is very pictorial throughout the speech, and the main time that he uses imagery is when he is talking about their rights as the form of a cheque.  The crowd can really understand the idea here, and this is shown by their reaction, both part way through the idea, and at the end of it.  The way that he makes it clear that the ‘cheque’ has not been ‘cashed’ is so cleverly done that people can really understand that the rights have not been given.  The way that he communicates with the audience by using an idea that would have been clear and understandable to most of them, (that the ‘cheque’ had come back marked ‘insufficient funds’) shows how he has really tried to work on an idea that would really get his point through.

Join now!

All the way through the speech, Martin Luther King uses pictures, or forms to explain abstract nouns.  He literally gives a feeling or an emotion (the abstract nouns) a solid object to refer to.  E.g. “…beacon light of hope…” and “…desolate valley of segregation…”  This lets the audience almost be able to ‘see’ or ‘touch’ emotions – he is using types of metaphor to display things that may not be understood normally. This is a good way of working his speech – so that he does not bore people with things / ideas that they do not understand.  This ...

This is a preview of the whole essay