Activist, Martin Luther King, Jr., in his speech essay, “I Have a Dream,” argues a point to end racism in the United States. Martin Luther King’s purpose represents hope that the black people could enjoy the same rights pursuing equal, freedom, and happiness, such as equivalent status and civic rights, the right to vote and the right to be elected. He adopts insistent tone in order to convince African Americans to not give up their support to end the racism in America.
Throughout the speech, Dr. King repeats words and sentence. This is a very outstanding feature in this speech called repetition. Used in speech, repetition not only makes it easy for the audience to follow what the speaker is saying, but also gives a strong rhythmic quality to the speech and makes it more memorable. In paragraphs eight through sixteen, for example, King uses the words “I have a dream” nine times. This repetition helps to achieve the function of coherence in discourse and the function of …show more content…
It means exact repetition in equivalent positions. It differs from simple repetition in that the identity does not extend to absolute duplication. To put it in simple terms, parallelism means the balancing of sentence elements that are grammatically equal. To take them parallel, balance nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs, prepositional phrases with prepositional phrases, clauses with clauses, and so forth.
In his speech, Martin Luther King uses parallelism to create a strong rhythm to help the audience line up his ideas. Here are few examples: “…by the manacles of and the chains of discrimination…”(A) “This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drag of gradualism.”(B) It is traditionally believed that parallelism is used for the purpose of emphasizing and enhancing, esp. in speech, the ideas expressed by the speaker, thus always encouraging and inspiring the