So, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It's a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day, even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. 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. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day 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. I have a dream today. 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, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

欢迎大家通过飞书链接获取本章学习材料完整内容： https://my.feishu.cn/docx/HfPxd184Aor13OxX14Yc447knxh?from=from_copylink 00:05 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. 02:37 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. 04:12 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!" 07:59 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.

00:05 Day1 Reading Excerpt There are times when you are talking to people who you know are resistant to what you have to say. One often talks about speeches being meant to persuade. It's not my belief that they often change people's minds in the act of being spoken; they usually just move people from dead center to a position that they are ready to go to. We're in Ahmadabad, India; the year is 1924. Gandhi has been publishing material for Indian youth about his idea of Satyagraha — nonviolent, passive resistance — and has been accused by the occupying British government of sedition, a capital crime. Gandhi was trained as a lawyer. He's used to courtrooms — so you'll see that in part he is focusing on the primary target of his speech, the judge. But Gandhi is aware there is another, and for him more important, audience: the Indian people; the millions who had been following his printed words and who would now follow the speech through the newspapers. 02:25 Day2 Reading Excerpt In the following excerpts, you can see that this is a speech with no introduction. We are moving into the heart of things with his very first words: "Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith. But I had to make a choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered has done irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I have no personal ill-will against any single administrator, much less can I have any disaffection towards the King's person. But I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a government which in its totality has done more harm to India than any previous system." 03:27 Day3 Reading Excerpt "I am here, therefore, to invite and submit cheerfully to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appear to me to be the highest duty of a citizen." That's a great speech. Notice one is directed at the judge: I am here, cheerfully, to accept "the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appear to me — and obviously to his people — to be the highest duty of a citizen." The two audiences, the two tones as it were, are both there. The tone is very reasoned: he is giving a fair assessment; he is not asking for mercy. He recognizes the role of the judge and what the judge must expect; and that reasonable tone is, in fact, part of his defense. 05:29 Day4 Reading Excerpt He's making it easier for the judge to commute this sentence from death to some sort of penal servitude, and that is indeed what happened. It's a masterpiece of a speech, but it is, I think, one that better than most shows us a speech presented at two different audiences and very clearly satisfying both. 1. Ask yourself in advance, "Who is my audience?" and adapt your speech to address them particularly and directly. 2. Your tone, your language, and your examples should all be chosen with a specific audience in mind. 3. Always be courteous, respectful, sympathetic, and mindful of your audience's comfort.

00:05 Day1 Reading Excerpt Over the first three lectures of this part of our course, this middle part on crafting your speech, we've been considering big questions of structure and overall form. What I want to talk about today is something that we agreed wasn't very appropriate to those logical arguments that were the focus of our last lecture: painting pictures in words. I think the best person to introduce us to the concept of painting pictures in words is Tecumseh. He was a great Indian leader of the Shawnee tribe, a war leader during their wars against the United States in the early 19th century. Tecumseh, more than any other speaker I know — and he was very much part of a longstanding oral tradition — shows us how powerful images, pictorial language, concrete examples, and even imagined dialogues can be. In 1811, he was trying to rally the Indian tribes, and he's talking to them — the Osages, and later the Choctaws and the Chickasaws — about the importance of Indian unity. Observe the vividness and concreteness in his speech: "Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pocanet, and other power tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and oppression of the white man, as snow before the summer sun. ... Sleep no longer, O Choctaws and Chickasaws, in delusive hopes. ... Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?" 01:57 Day2 Reading Excerpt With this kind of very pictorial language, Tecumseh is holding the interest of his listeners in two very specific ways: One is when he gives you a very concrete example that is a real-world example of something that he sees is going to happen. He doesn't just tell you, "We shall be defeated by our enemies and lose our land, and will we not then have this problem of our tribal lands and all of our revered tombs of our ancestors being desecrated?" He wants you to feel it: "Will not the bones of our dead be plowed up, and their graves turned into plowed fields?" This is powerful. A simple prediction that there would be trouble ahead or there would be desecration of land doesn't carry this kind of power; and this is what ultimately rallied the tribes behind him to join in a unified effort to save Indian land east of the Mississippi River. 02:56 Day3 Reading Excerpt But what I really am impressed with in Tecumseh is his genius for picking metaphors. A metaphor is a figural piece of language, a figure of speech, where you use one image to represent another. He talks about how these peoples walk the same path, slake their thirst at the same spring, sit around the same council fire — they are actually sitting around that same council fire at the moment. He calls on a lifetime of experience; the walking the same path, the slaking the thirst at the same spring are metaphors for being all one people. Tecumseh is putting them in terms you can picture, images that you can easily remember and hold in your heart that seem to call on a commonality of experience and really enhance, really reinforce his meaning. That's a metaphor; but there's also the simile where he's saying one thing is like another. In that beautiful roll call of the dead tribes — where are they? where are the Pocanet; where are the Mohican? — he ends with an extraordinary simile worthy to come out of the Iliad or the Odyssey, which are a pair of books full of similes: it's the moment where he says, "They have vanished … as snow before the summer sun." To make it a metaphor, he would have said, "They were the snow before the summer sun"; the simile is "as snow" or "like the snow." In either case, we are getting the richness, the power of that image to give new life, and a much longer life, to the thought that's embedded in Tecumseh's words. To me, he ranks with Lincoln among the greatest American orators of the 19th century. 04:58 Day4 Reading Excerpt Take-Away Points: 1. Focus the attention of your listeners with words that create images in the mind. 2. Use poetic language to make your words easy to recollect and more evocative of memories, of feelings, of shared experience with your audience. 3. In logical arguments or technical explanations, use metaphors to help your listeners "see" a problem or a situation more clearly than they would with an abstract, non-metaphorical explanation. 4. Don't mix your metaphors, and make sure your metaphors are appropriate for the particular occasion and audience. 5. Make abstract observations and principles vivid to your listeners by adding concrete, easy-to-picture examples. 6. Energize your presentation by imagining dialogue and dramatic confrontations. 7. Apply images and vivid language when you are speaking from the heart.

01:19 Day1 Excerpt **Susan B. Anthony was an American of the mid-19th century famous for her work trying to secure the vote for women in America. In 1872, she had walked into a barbershop — which was a voter registration place — and demanded the right to register; and when she cowed the people there into submission and did register, she was then accused of a crime and fined $100. She never paid that fine, but starting in the following year she gave the speech that would become her signature speech on the subject of voters' rights. Susan B. Anthony built a logical case to illustrate the necessity of women's suffrage.** 02:30 Day2 Excerpt **"Friends and fellow citizens, I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote."** **Now she presents the axiom, the unassailable truth on which her argument will be based:** **"The preamble of the federal Constitution says: 'We the people of the United States.'"** **Definitions of terms — very important to anybody building a logical case:** **"It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens. ... And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government — the ballot."** 04:09 Day3 Excerpt **"For any state to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land."** **"The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities."** 04:59 Day4 Excerpt **That is the core of her speech. It is a logical case built step by step, starting with axioms, going on to definitions, going on to examinations and demonstrations of different points, and ending with a conclusion.** **I believe if you can learn from our great guest professors, if you can take to heart what they show you about the step-by-step progression of building a logical speech, your logic will be able to prevail in almost any argument that you choose to make.**