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Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. cowrote his “I Have a Dream” speech with his close confidant Clarence Jones. In 2011, Clarence Jones and Stuart Connelly published Behind the Dream, a behind-the-scenes account of the weeks leading up to King’s delivery of that speech at the March on Washington.1 The following passage is an excerpt from the prologue to Behind the Dream. Read the passage carefully. Then, write an essay that analyzes the rhetorical choices Jones makes to achieve his purpose.

User Vbartalis
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Final answer:

Clarence Jones's rhetorical choices in portraying the creation of the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. serve to emphasize the historical importance and enduring legacy of the speech as a key element in civil rights advocacy.

Step-by-step explanation:

The rhetorical choices made by Clarence Jones in his account of the creation of the "I Have a Dream" speech serve to highlight the profound impact of Martin Luther King Jr.'s words during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Jones, who co-wrote the speech with King, utilizes vivid descriptions and historical context to illustrate the significance of this pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement. He emphasizes the collaborative effort that went into the speech and its subsequent role as a cornerstone of civil rights advocacy.

By detailing the preparations and considerations that King and his team undertook, Jones provides readers with an intimate look behind the scenes. This includes the orchestration of the march itself, the strategic importance of their message, and the emotional resonance of King's delivery. Utilizing anec dotes and insights from this period, Jones crafts a narrative that underscores the ethos of King as a leader, the pathos of the civil rights struggle, and the logos of their arguments for equality and justice. The result is a comprehensive look at how prophetic rhetoric and biblical allusions were used to not only inspire but also to achieve tangible political objectives, emphasizing the enduring legacy of the speech.

User Jubueche
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Hello. You forgot to provide the necessary text to answer this question. The text is:

"A quarter of a million people, human beings who generally had spent their lives treated as something less, stood shoulder to shoulder across that vast lawn, their hearts beating as one. Hope on the line. When hope was an increasingly scarce resource. There is no death of prose describing the mass of humanity that made its way to the feet of the Great Emancipator that day, no metaphor that has slipped through the cracks waiting to be discovered, dusted off, and injected into the discourse a half century on. The March on Washington has been compared to a tsunami, a shockwave, a wall, a living monument, a human mosaic, an outright miracle. It was all of those things, and if you saw it with your own eyes, it wasn't hard to write about. With that many people in one place crying out for something so elemental, you don't have to be Robert Frost to offer some profound eloquence.

Still, I can say to those who know the event only as a steely black-and white television image, it's a shame that the colors of that day-the blue sky, the vibrant green life, the golden sun everywhere-are not part of our national memory. There is something heart-wrenching about the widely shown images and film clips of the event that belies the joy of the day. But it could be worse. We could have been marching in an era before cameras and recording devices, then the specifics of the event would eventually fade out of living memory and the world would be left only with the mythology and the text. Text without context, in this case especially, would be quite a loss. One might imagine standing before an audience and reading Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr's " Have a Dream" speech verbatim, but it is a stretch to believe that any such performance would sow the seeds of change with, as Dr. King put it that day in Washington, the "fierce urgency of now." The vast crowd, the great speaker, the words that shook the world-it all comes as a package deal. We are truly fortunate to have a record. Yet what the television cameras and radio microphones captured that August day is but a sliver of the vibrancy of the event. When a film adaptation of a beloved novel premieres, the people who say "Oh, buty i got to read the book" are inevitably right. The density of the written word makes the flat motion picture a par artifact in comparison. In a similar fashion, although watching the black-and white news footage of Dr. King's"

Answer:

Clarence Jones' speech shown above, makes strong use of the rhetorical feature called "phatos" which is a feature that invokes the emotion of the palteia.

This is exactly what Jones wants to achieve with his words, he wants those who have access to his speech to be moved by everything that Martin Luther King's speech represented and how that speech was able to move crowds in search of a single goal, freedom and justice.

Jones also evokes pathos for showing how lucky our generation is to have this speech documented, although the documentation fails to express all the feeling and experience that King's words provoked. In addition, it shows how influential and moving this discourse can be today.

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