Gettysburg Address And I Have A Dream Essay

Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr both said amazing speeches, Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and Dr.King’s “I have a dream”. Although Lincoln was an American president and Dr.King was an African-American civil rights leader, both King and Lincoln told their speeches for the reason of urgency for freedom, but conveyed it in different ways. The common theme between their speeches is the demand for immediate change. Both of these speakers used rhetoric to affect their crowd, for example, when Lincoln says “Men gave their lives so a country might live”, or when Dr.King repeats “Let it ring” over and over again.

Although they are completely different speakers, Lincoln and King both tried to express the urgency of freedom. They both accomplished this by using sentence structure such as repetition and parallelism. One example of parallelism from Kings speech is the phrase “One hundred years later”. This is useful because with King saying one hundred years later, it shows how even after the civil war African-Americans are still deprived from the freedom gained from the civil war. One example of repetition from Kings speech is “I have a dream”. With repeating I have a dream it shows
This is because these men were talking to their following about a subject that many have fought for and died for. They worded their speeches perfectly in my opinion. I think this because they used very little words to make a huge impact on their speech which is wonderful in by itself but it also got a positive reaction from most of their crowd. That is my personal opinion on these speeches.

In conclusion, the speakers both use rhetoric to their advantage and persuade their audience to take their sides in their common theme of demand for immediate change. Although they used different words and even talked in a completely different way and in completely different eras, they both managed to get their point across in a good