“I have a dream”

“I have a dream…” what famous and familiar sentence it is. Since the moment Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke with a passionate strenuousness at Lincoln Memorial, Washington in 1963, this speech is bound to become the landmark of liberal and radical movements of Negroes.

The great speech stirred thousands people’s hearts. I think the most important reason is his abundant diction. His sentences were long and well structured, interwoven with parallel words and phrases. At the beginning of almost every paragraph, he started with the sentence “I have a dream…” which made the speech a whole. MLKJ also spoke in the first person, which strengthened the power of the words. In the lecture, he mentioned many states and feathers of those states, to make his speech more believable. He used simile to express his complex emotions. Such a vivid and active speech absolutely depended on its content, plenty of short true story appeared in this lecture, even if they are concise and short, they influenced the tone of the entire speech indeed. Some beautiful and peaceful scenes draw by MLKJ in the speech, for example, the paragraph “I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there 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.” had a strong quarter as well.

By studying this famous speech, we really can learn some vital writing skills to make our articles logical and persuasive.

Link to "I have a dream" http://www.cycnet.com/englishcorner/speech/dream.htm