Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail Essay

Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail - Essay Example The main techniques selected for analysis are emotional appeal, logic and reasoning. Reasoning is one of the main tools used by speechwriters and essayists for ages. In the Letter, King makes his point and persuades readers to agree with him that all people have a right to be free. King states: "The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation" (King). King expects that his letter helps many people to "awake" from long sleeping and start fighting, because the new social order and ideas, and no doubt that in his society the main role is featured to democracy and freedom. He appeals to such human values as tolerance and morals. Idiom and metaphors create sense of reality. For instance, he writes: "the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice" (King). The notion of interdependency and connection among individuals in King's conception of freedom anticipates visions of freedom and solidarity that I explore in the second half of this book. According to King, true freedom requires that people be able to exercise choice and judgment. Segregation removes this ability and therefore makes individuals victims to the decisions of others. King deals with his personal sufferings and expresses the effects of the segregation on his fellow friends on a scale of universal significance. His language is logic and accurate, concise and creative. King's rhetoric has strength, depth and delicacy of feeling. The main feature of this essay is that King uses historical information based on reason and expiations of the events which attract attention of the audience. "If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity"' (King). Control of powerful feeling intensifies emotional appeal and adds dramatic effects. To give dramatic descriptions with intensity, to make the imagined picture of reality glow with more than a dim light, requires the author's finest compositional powers. He addresses listeners stating: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you" (King). In the Letter, King creates a vivid image of racial segregation as "a burden" with deprives many racial minorities a chance to be free from oppression and humiliation. There is intensity of illusion because the author is present, constantly reminding readers of his unnatural wisdom. The moral quality depends not on the validity of doctrines, but on the moral sense and arguments presented in the work. In both books, a certain amount of plot is based on emotional response. For instance, "oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for fre edom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro" (King). Exclamation marks, rhetorical question and parallel structure of sentences add emotional coloring. Personal tone is also an important element of his rhetoric, because it creates a certain vision of segregation and inequality from the author's point of view. Logic is another technique used by King to appeal to the audience and their mind. In the Letter, every argument forestalls the next one. Vivid arguments and personal examples are logically connected which helps the audience to