The speech “I Have a Dream” have 78 sentences in total, included 9 sentences with over 30 words in each. The longest sentence has 77 words; the shortest one has only 4 words. The whole speech consists of the mid to long length of sentences, which clearly stated the claim: improve the human right for African Americans.
In a peer article written by Joe Ciesinski, he stated that Martin Luther King Jr. contrasts light and dark metaphors in his speech” (Ciesinski, p.18). In the first paragraph, the phrase “beacon light”, is a metaphor that referred to the Emancipation Proclamation that gives hope to the Negro slaves suffering from the injustice. The joyous daybreak is another metaphor of the and end the long-term of captivity. King chose the words …show more content…
He used the metaphor of brotherhood to encourage the audience to consider the freedom and equity across the racial differences. King also used the word “heat” to metaphorically refer to the oppression while the word of oasis to refer to freedom and justice. King encouraged people to believe their faith so that they were able to “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” In here, the mountain referred to the despair people had at that time; the stone refers as the hope they should have in minds for the future. Moreover, the terms of jangling discords referred as the fighting issues for the racial issues and word of symphony of brotherhood referred to connection across the different races. King used many examples in this paragraph to demonstrate his hope that the black and white people can get well along and the freedom ring everywhere across the …show more content…
First of all, the speech itself anchored in a powerful related location. It is symbolic for Martin Luther King to stand on the step of the Lincoln Memorial and make speeches starting with the word “Five score years ago……”, this let his audience be able to adapt their own stories (setting & location) into the contents that Martin Luther King, Jr. was going to talk in his presentation. Second, in his speech, King had included touchstones that spoke to both the head and the heart. In the beginning of his speech, Dr. King talked the references about the Emancipation Proclamation to drive his audiences think about the historical improvement they had in the past, and this historical fact enhance the reliability on his words. In the following paragraphs, King described the scenes and gave many examples to touch audience’s hearts to make them believe everything will be better if they get involved into the civil rights movement. At the end of the speech, he talked about terms and phrases from the Bible to raise people ‘s emotion into higher levels to achieve the goal of providing inspiration to the Negro spiritually. Thirdly, the speech used vivid and metaphorical language. Many speeches are boring when they related to the important topics. It is quite easy for them to bring too much complex terms or concepts to the audience and make people to get lost or lose interest in the topic; Dr. King used vivid