"Letter from Birmingham City Jail," Martin Luther King Jr. (16 April 1963)
• Allusion—making a brief reference to historical, literary, or religious ideas or events or people in order to reinforce a rhetorical point.
ex. "We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights."
• Parallelism—constructing a sentence or series of sentences with repeated grammatical structures in order to emphasize points.
ex. "But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'nigger,' your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes 'John,' and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."
• Authority—referring to a quote or idea expressed by some authority in the area of the point being made by the writer.
ex. "To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law."
• Rhetorical question—posing a question to prompt the reader to consider the ideas in the question, not necessarily to answer the question directly.
ex. "Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?"
• Aphorism—crafting brief memorable statements in order to emphasize a key point, often incorporating rhyme, repetition, or some other technique to achieve the effect desired.
ex. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
• Repetition—repeating words or similar forms of words for effect.
ex. "Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."
• Figurative language—incorporating metaphorical language in nonfiction writing—metaphors, similes, personification.
ex. "We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." and "Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty."
