It is no secret that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln wrote some amazing speeches. There are quite a few similarities in Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” and King’s “I have a dream” speech. Lincoln and King both used three key ideas to support their purpose and to Identify the urgency for freedom. Both gentle men used repetition, parallelism and a dedicated and very serious tone.
The first significant factor is repetition. It is used in both speeches to put a point out and so everyone knows their purpose for writing their speech. The repetition in king’s speech was “Now is the to make real the promises of democracy; now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood; now is the time to make justice a reality for all of god’s children”(49). The repeating phrase is “Now is the time”. He uses that phrase so he can evoke the audience to stand up and fight with him and so that they understand what he is fighting for. In Lincoln’s speech the repetition he uses is “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground”(27). The repeating phrase in Lincoln’s speech was “we…show more content… Parallelism is words or phrases that have similar structure or grammatical form. For example in King’s speech it says “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”.(51) King chose to use parallelism to emphasize the meaning of together. Also, to emphasize how they all need to become one to be truly free. Another example used in Lincoln’s speech is “and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth”.(28) Lincoln’s purpose for using parallelism is to show what the government is to the people and also, to advance his
