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Day1 Reading Excerpt
We're going to do a sort of anatomical analysis to understand why this speech by this minister from a church in Atlanta, Georgia, was nominated by the journalists of the Guardian newspaper in London in the year 2000 as the most important and influential speech of the 20th century.
In this lecture, we study a very different kind of speech with a different emphasis: the famous "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. I think it's important to remember that a speech needs a principal tone, and the tone that pervades Martin Luther King's speech is the tone of ethos, the personal feeling. This is a speech that I think you should take as your model when you're thinking about speeches that are meant to be inspirational.
The year is 1963; we are standing with hundreds of thousands of people outside the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall at Washington DC. Martin Luther King Jr. has his back to the Lincoln Memorial, which contains not only the great statue of Lincoln seated but also quotations from the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Lincoln is the great emancipator; Martin Luther King wants to evoke his spirit immediately in his speech, and he does it without even naming Lincoln. How?
Here is the first sentence of Martin Luther King's speech: "Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation." What a thought-provoking way to make the audience connect this present occasion with what happened in the Civil War 100 years before — that war that was fought over the issue of slavery, and that had not yet brought to a full resolution equal rights for all Americans.
Day2 Reading Excerpt
He begins to work his way through other ideas, broadening the original application of the fact that an essential injustice and oppression has been done, touching on some of those actual oppressive acts, but in general staying away from that. If you're trying to inspire people, follow Martin Luther King's example: do not use negatives to try to create a positive. He rigorously excludes from almost the entire speech any specific references to the outrages, the indignities, the criminal acts that have been done in the effort to deny African Americans their rights; instead, he is relentlessly positive. Relentless positivism makes people feel, no matter what your exact words, that they want to be with you as you work your way through to your conclusion.
It's at the end of the transition that we suddenly find him talking about dreams — the American Dream, his own dream — and now comes that second part of the speech, the one that is stuck in everybody's minds. This is where the dream begins to echo through the speech, resound like the ringing of a bell again and again.
Day3 Reading Excerpt
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed [and now he stops his own words and quotes the Declaration of Independence]: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"
He goes through a number of other dreams, but at the heart of this litany comes the heart of the ethos, the heart of the personal vision. He is actually going to describe for you his dream for his own family — you can't get more intimate than that:
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
That is powerful, not only because it's so personal but because of a simple device: alliteration.
As he goes on, he begins to work away from the dream, and with another transition he moves toward the third part of his speech, the pathos, where we are going to be in the realm of emotion. He sees a mystical thing: a gigantic mountain, whittled down to a single small stone. The mountain was despair, but what has been carved down out of it is hope. That's a beautiful image. He also has another image — although this one is one that you would hear — discords, conflicting sounds gradually being transformed into brotherly harmony as the whole world learns to sing together.
That's his transition to the pathos, the emotional part of the speech, and this for him is as important clearly as the ethos where he's ringing the bell of "I have a dream." Now we are getting into the world of a different phrase: "let freedom ring." At the end, he has a short conclusion to wrap it all up; and in his conclusion, having brought together these opposites and reconciled all the conflicts, he sees all the people gathering together and singing, in the words of a traditional spiritual hymn:
"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
Day4 Reading Excerpt
Take-Away Points:
1. Integrate all three kinds of appeals — logic, personal concerns, and emotions — if you want to make your most satisfying and most compelling case.
2. If you want to create the feeling of visions, repeat words and phrases.
3. Weave familiar quotations and references to well-known texts into your speech.
4. Divide a long speech into three clear-cut sections; give each section its own particular tone and its own particular take on your theme.
5. Maintain eye contact with your audience, and maintain your energy while reading quotes. Use pauses and changes in vocal tone to set the quotes apart from your text.
