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Letter From Birmingham Jail Rhetorical Devices

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Persuasive works use many rhetorical devices to help the writer or speaker grab the audience's attention, or even manipulate certain emotions. Martin Luther King, Jr. used rhetorical devices in his works to create responses in his audience. He chose which devices to use based on his audience and the occasion. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was meant to carry emotional appeal, while his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” focused on logical appeal. One of the rhetorical devices Dr. King used was antithesis, the use of antithesis in Dr. King's works is fairly exemplary, and would be one of the best representations of it today. Dr King's “I Have a Dream” speech contains a fair amount of antitheses. An example is “ I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” this …show more content…

uses in his works. Mr. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. uses a lot of different analogies in many ways, this can help make a work entertaining, and even humor the work. In Dr king's i have a dream speech analogies can be picked out of it everywhere. One of these is “lonely island of poverty” this phrase uses the island to represent poverty, thus it is lonely because of how lonely poverty is. A phrase right after that is “a vast ocean of material prosperity.” in this example material prosperity is compared to a vast ocean, this shows that material prosperity is everywhere and covers a lot of area in the world just as an ocean does. There are many other examples such as “Storms of persecution”, “to cash a check”, and “Seared in flames of injustice”. Some examples can be found in Dr. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”. One of these is he compares Adolf Hitler abusing laws that were legal yet immoral to the whites of power doing the same here. He also uses analogy to compare his arrest to that of the christian apostle

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