Analysis Questions for Martin Luther King, Jr.

s I Have a Dream
(Please complete this assignment once BOTH the Rhetorical Device Notebook and Gettysburg are completed)
Directions: Please read Martin Luther King, Jr.s I Have a Dream speech and annotate, mark up the passage, analyzing
for tone, purpose, rhetorical devices, organization, etc. When finished, please answer the following questions in
complete sentences and in great detail; when asked to cite a line, please write the entire quotation that you are citing.
Note: the questions asked require more than a one sentence response. These answers are to be typed up and
submitted via the turn in button on Edmodo prior to entering our room on the first day of class.
1. MLKs speech was delivered in Washington D.C in front of the Washington Monument. This location is important
because he was try to get America to rise up and become equal, and what better place than in the capital.
2. African Americans are the intended audience for this speech. I know that his audience was for African
Americans by the ways he says negros then uses we. However his audience was also the entire nation.
3. Kings need to deliver this speech to his audience was prompted because of the way blacks were being treated.
I know this to be true because the purpose of this essay is equality he wanted all to be treated fairly.
4. The overarching purpose King articulates within his speech is the need for freedom, even though slaves had
been freed blacks still had not been given their unalienable rights. I know because it is right in the speech that
all he wants is equality for all.
5. King makes his audience believe in him and his cause by telling the people what they want to hear, by being with
the people, by fighting with the people not against. King makes them believe that they can achieve the goal of
equality. Slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. After king said that any African
American would do whatever it takes to become equal. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair King is trying
to restore hope in his people. All men are created equal trying to build up emotions for not being treated
equal.
6. Kings appeal to his audience is mainly emotional. crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of
discrimination and great beacon light of hope are two emotional statements.
7. Kings reference to a promissory note and the check explains that he thinks that America owes him something.
His statement was a metaphor.

8. King organizes his speech in an interesting way, he talks about the hardships of Negros, slaves who had been
seared in the flames of withering injustice, then talks about how America did not honor th[eir] sacred
obligation, then king goes on to talk about freedom. This is all strategically placed in his speech to build up the
emphasis.
9. In the speech King shifts pronouns when in the beginning he talks about the Africa American population as a
whole, then he switches the focus to him and the point of this speech of his dream.

10. King implements persuasive devices, such as ethos, pathos and logos within his speech. Pathos provides a nice
emotion to the speech. crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination and slaves
who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice both use emotion to get you to care. Ethos, appealing
to a person's ethics or character, I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama little black boys and black
girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers and I have a dream
that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will
be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight in both he has a dream of equality for all. Logos,
appealing to logic, Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed
the Emancipation Proclamation and When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the
Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every
American was to fall heir. Both of these appeal to logic.
11. Throughout the speech King uses other rhetorical devices to help persuade his audience to support his cause.
Kings reference to a promissory note and the check explains that he thinks that America owes him something.
His statement was a metaphor. With It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment
he uses foreshadowing.
12. If I had to select one quote, from within the speech to use to represent the overarching purpose of Kings
speech, it would be the Negro still is not free this speech is about trying to make the African Americans free, as
well as trying to make them equal.
13. This speech endures because it is one of hope, change, and new beginnings. This speech changed the way white
Americans thought, at least most of them, the words are more than just words they were the foundation for a
better America.