Powerful persuasive techniques from a lesser-known speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I recently finished reading "All Labor Has Dignity,” a collection of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speeches. One that he delivered on Sept. 8, 1962, in Monticello, N.Y., struck me not only for its moral clarity but also its rhetorical tactics. While all people are created equal, King understood that all words are not. Beliefs are only powerful if shaped by the right words in the right order. He says, "Three simple words explain the social revolution taking place in Albany and the South today." Doesn’t that make the listener want to hear what those words are? King does not just come out and say what he’s going to say, because the force of his message would be lost on the audience. He primes the audience to start thinking about what the words are, and he then frames what is coming by telling them what the words are not: "They aren't big words. One does not need to have a philosophical bent to understand them." He does this setup, and then he unveils: "They are three simple words: the word all, the word here, and the word now." He could have said simply, "We want all our rights now." But his construct instead invites the audience to discover this idea themselves. His technique of saying what the words are not creates a powerful contrast when he reveals what they are. The audience finds its own wisdom; he does not force it down their throats. King then makes this abstract idea concrete: "What we are saying is that we want all of our rights and we want them here in the red hills of Georgia, here behind the cotton curtains of Alabama, here on the soils of Mississippi. . . . We aren't willing to wait two hundred years for our rights." Masterful. He groups the words into threes, which is a perfect number for the human mind to grasp. He primes the audience to anticipate, then he lets them exercise some cognitive power, but not a lot, to discern how the words fit together. He hammers his message home, not by telling the listeners("We want our rights here in the United States') but by showing the audience with vivid examples: red hills, the cotton curtains, the soils. It’s masterful.