Rhetorical Analysis Of King

Recently, scholars have analyzed King’s (2003) chapter You’ll Never Believe What Happened is Always a Good Way to Start, with the intent to discover King’s rhetorical techniques and overall purpose. At the time of his speech, the world was “predominantly scientific, capitalistic, Judeo-Christian” (p.12). Firstly, Cassandra Plettell (2017) found that King utilizes ethos to demonstrate how stories may alter an individual’s perception (p.2). Similarly, Emma Murphy (2017) found that King uses ethos and pathos that “portrays the idea that stories have the ability to greatly impact individuals’ lives” (p.2). Then, Ajodeji Edna Adetimechin (2017) found that King uses ethos, pathos, and logos to convince his audience of the influential power that stories “have in shaping perspectives” (p.2). In general, they have found that King’s purpose is regarding the influential powers of stories with the use of ethos, pathos and/or logos. In addition to Plettell, Murphy and Adetimechin’s finding, I would like to go a step further and argue that King’s overall purpose is to persuade the audience that the Genesis creation story has formulated a culture that lacks forgiveness, compassion, and unity (King, 2003, pp.24-27). Inclusively, I will argue how King utilizes his personal experiences with stories, emotional appeals, and writing arrangement in order to gradually persuade his highly intellectual audience.

King made the white churches feel guilty for doing nothing to help the African American protests and violating morals established by the early church. King mentions the word

Thesis: King brilliantly applies rhetorical strategies such as pathos, logos and ethos that are crucial in successfully influencing detractors of his philosophical views on civil disobedience.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” collectively persuade their audiences to disobey authority when it concerns social injustice. King takes a more assertive yet respectful approach, and makes it a point to explicate the intolerable treatment that the black community had to endure under the encroachment of segregation laws. In addition, Thoreau expounds why it is so important for citizens to object and take action upon the corrupt laws that the government had imposed on the blacks, insisting that civil disobedience is a means of freedom. Both of these influential men successfully utilize occasion, purpose, tone, appeals and rhetorical strategies to

King defends the protestors’ decision for direct action over negotiation by saying “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks

Martin Luther King Jr. discusses the advantages and purposes for his theory of nonviolent direct action in his Letter From Birmingham City Jail. He shows four basic steps that must be taken to achieve nonviolent action. They include 1) collection of facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action. Each of these steps will be explained as part of King's argument later in this essay. The main purpose of a nonviolent campaign is to force any community to confront a problem rather than refuse to negotiate or face a specific issue. In the letter, King discusses his group's reasons for coming to Birmingham.

Additionally, King builds his credibility with the utilization of ethos in his text in order to convince them of his argument. By appealing to the readers’ ethics, they can see how trustworthy King’s words are and then can let themselves be persuaded by his matter-of fact tone and professionalism in writing. King is a realist, which means that he almost always represents things as they really are, which profoundly helps establish his honest persona. Most of Stephen King’s writing represents more than one tenet, as his stories that he tells about his childhood and road to recovery from drug addiction and alcoholism can be seen as not only pathos, but and etho as well, as these stories help the readers to understand what kind of person he is, and how he accomplished all of his success despite a couple of major roadblocks. This is why it can be seen that King uses pathos most heavily in his writing, by telling vivid stories, etc. in order to touch upon human emotion towards human experiences/traits, while also creating a strong voice in his writing as well. The overlapping of these appeals help support the ethics and sensibility of King’s work. There are scores of times where it can be clearly identified where ethos have been used in his writing. For example, King says “I’m a slow reader, but i usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; i read because i like to read.- Similarly, I don't read to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories-Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones” (King, pg 145) This helps to support the idea that writing is learned through reading, and also is learned through the mistakes of other writers. There is no better way to learn than to look at a piece of writing that has some minor or even major flaws and to analyze the piece to see what the issue is, and learn from their mistake to better your own writing in the future. Another one of King’s main arguments is that no writer is perfect. There are always things that you can do to make your writing even better, no matter how small the adjustment may be. It’s a learning process

King creates an empathetic link when he utilizes the words "When you have" (King 2) followed by grievous moments in a typical African American life. For the purpose of showing the leaders why the Negroes cannot wait any longer for civil justice. Rather it is not that simple, King chose to write this to create an empathic link between the religious leaders and the African Americans. He does this with the intention of having the leaders feel the urgency and the burning pain the oppressed race has gone through. Simply, the African American walk of life is encroached by the actions and power of whites, creating an emotional scene for the leaders. King also rejects the fallacy that the leaders created with the "Isn't this like condemning..."(King 3) anaphora. The leaders believed that the peaceful actions of the civil rights group should be condemned for they participated in violence. King felt that this statement did not make any logical sense, but instead of outright saying it, he simply repeated instances where peaceful actions were taken place, but the subject faced consequences. In fact, by comparing the situation to the Christian icon Jesus, King exposes the fallacy of the leaders. In a broader sense, the parallelism between Jesus and King is noticed. Biblically, Jesus came down to Earth from Heaven to save sinners by acting as a sacrifice and dying on the cross. On the other hand, Historically, King came to Birmingham from Atlanta to aid the Civil Rights Movement by protesting, thus sending him to jail. Both came down to save a group, but to do so both were

Both, Thoreau and King, in their works “Civil Disobedience” and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” successfully and effectively delineates arguments for the importance and necessity of civil disobedience. Although both essays present very similar ideas, it is important to note the similarities and differences which are evident through the use of language and the presentation of the arguments and ideas because if it were not for the proper use of language, tone, and presentation of the idea of civil disobedience in Dr. King’s letter, he might not have been successful in his campaign; Thoreau initially presented the idea of civil disobedience in 1848, but his contemporaries dismissed his political essays.

Academy award winning film, The King’s Speech, is a motivational movie where voice and courage become a matter of life and death. Prince Albert, later known as King George VI (Colin Firth), stammers excessively and uncontrollably through his inaugural speech closing the 1925 British Empire Exhibition due to a speech impediment. After finishing such a disappointing speech, Prince Albert decides to give up on himself and accept his fate as a stammering heir to the throne. However, his wife, Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter), enlists him to see an Aussie speech therapist that goes by the name of Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) whose “Antipodean methods are known to be ‘unorthodox’ and ‘controversial,’” (“The King’s

I interpreted it as King trying to get the clergymen to acknowledge these issues by viewing it from the blacks perspective. When a person is told to look at a situation from a point of view that differs from their own, it opens doors to new perspective and understanding. Also, most people tend to lead by emotion, possibly providing King’s desired outcome of understanding and action.

Expressing disappointment towards the church leaders, he states that they should do more, to help the minority stand on their two feet, and not feel discriminated against. This is because following the teachings of God, every human being is equal. Therefore, the church must help structure society closest to how The Bible shows. King fought for this same equality. However, being verbally reprimanded and going to jail for voicing his rights, he shows what happens when you go against the norm of society. The church is there to break those norms, and construct new ideals in accordance with the word of God.

King continues to say that some of the preachers of God have understood the need for justice, but some have suppressed the blacks themselves. He believes that the preachers have to break the traditional, unjustified rules of the society to allow for the freedom of the children of God. The true meaning of the Bible lies in justice and co-existence. He wants moral justice to overcome the traditional norms which were unjust in nature. He conveys this message well in his letter. He further writes: “One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage” (King 6).

The speech I chose to analyze is Every Man a King by Huey P. Long. This speech was truly moving especially since the era was during the Great Depression. Wealth inequality was at an unsurpassed high in America, and the majority of the people were in the position of struggle and famine. Huey Long was a longtime advocate of redistributing wealth in his own state, he took this platform to a national scale to address his concern of building support for his movement. The society that he was making was the "Share the Wealth Society", a society in which the motto was "every man a king" and whose goal was the limit the wealth of the rich and share with the poor. He used sources such as the Bible, information about the past presidents and philosophers, as well as information of the amount of debt the U.S. has to support his claim. Huey P. Long used ethos, pathos, and logos to persuade his listeners of the broadcast to create a "Share the Wealth Society" in their communities.

To understand King’s views on nonviolent protest, I will start by summarizing some of the main points in his “Letter from Birmingham jail”. In spite of the fact that the "Letter” is verifiably worried with justice all through, King likewise addresses the question specifically at a few focuses. In actuality, he places that justice maintains the poise of the human soul, while injustice conflicts with it. By talking about this idea by and large, he builds up criteria by which to obscurely assault both segregation and silence it. He at last suggests that the man who sees injustice and does nothing to stop it is acting unjustly also. Taking after this thought, he contends that laws must be permeated with an ethical sense so as to be just; as such, law and morality can not be viewed as independent interests or areas. The best way to really enact change and help humankind rise above its confinements is to act with as well as grasp “extremism”. According to Mott, “That this action had been termed “extreme” King admits “initially disappointed” him.” But King decides that if loyalty to good principles