A Call for Unity

Last week would have been the 95th birthday of Reverend Martin Luthor King Jr which, this year, happily coincided with Martin Luthor King Day, always marked on the third Monday of January. As part of our course on rhetoric and persuasion, students worked with King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech to improve their skills of analysis and hear those rhetorical techniques put into action by a master of his craft. Some 100 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves, a young church pastor climbed the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to describe his vision of America. More than 200,000 people – black and white – came to listen. While it’s highly unlikely you’ll get such a well-known and instantly recognisable speech as a text in Paper 1, that doesn’t stop you practicing with familiar words and phrases. So this is what we did…