What rhetorical devices are used in the gettysburg address?

“The Gettysburg Address” by Abraham Lincoln is remarkable through the use of rhetorical devices like allusion, antithesis, and tricolon.

In the “Gettysburg Adress” written by Abraham Lincoln in November 19, 1863, Lincoln uses the rhetorical devices Alliteration, allusion, and diction To make his speech memorable to all the American Citizens. Lincoln uses diction to emphasize his point in writing the speech.

Abraham Lincoln used literary devices like alliteration, repetition, and personification To produce a special effect in his speech. He stated his speech off with an allusion.

The phrase “four score and seven” is an allusion, or reference to another person or document. Here Lincoln is echoing the Bible’s language for the life of a human. Psalm 90 gives the standard life as “threescore years and ten.” Lincoln uses other allusions throughout his speech.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln uses rhetorical strategies such as Allusions, repetition, and antithesis To remind the listeners of the purpose of the soldier’s sacrifice: equality, freedom, and national unity. Lincoln’s address starts with an allusion to when the Declaration of Independence was signed.

The Gettysburg Address Rhetorical Devices

In “The Gettysburg Address,” Abraham Lincoln brings his point across of dedicating the cemetery at Gettysburg by using Repetition, antithesis, and parallelism. Abraham Lincoln uses repetition in his speech to bring a point across and to grab the audience attention.

The (Re)Birth of a Nation: Lincoln employs an extended birth metaphor throughout this short speech; words and phrases such as “brought forth,” “conceived,” and “a new birth of freedom,” reflect this. The birth metaphor allows Lincoln to convey a hopeful, inspirational tone in the speech.

In his speech, Abraham Lincoln utilizes alliteration, in his first sentence, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth”, he uses the same sound in “Four score”, “fathers”, and “forth”, he does this to reinforce the meaning, it unifies his ideas, and helps him introduce the topic he is going to talk …

Some powerful examples of parallelism include the following:

• A new nation, that nation, any nation.
• That nation, that war, that field, that nation.
• We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow.
• Shall not have died in vain, shall have a new birth, shall not parish from the earth.

Returning to The Gettysburg Address, we can find many examples of antithesis, from simple ones such as “The brave men, living and dead” (juxtaposing “living” and “dead”) and more subtle ones such as the contrast between “say” and “did” in this sentence: “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, …

Throughout the Gettysburg address, Lincoln uses the literary device of anaphora—The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a series of statements. In this passage, Lincoln repeats “we can not” in order to drive home his point that Gettysburg has already been consecrated, by the dead rather than the living.

The tricolon (also called triple or triad) is a rhetorical device through which speakers list or name three things or actions in a row. The tricolon is meant to add power to words and make them memorable. One example is: “But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground.”.

Everyone knows the irony of that line where Lincoln says “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here” — ironic because his brief dedicatory remarks have become the most famous American speech. In fact, the Gettysburg Address must rank high among the greatest speeches anywhere.

While the speech is extremely short—just 267 words—Lincoln used the opportunity both to honor the sacrifice of the soldiers and to remind American citizens of the necessity of continuing to fight the Civil War. The Gettysburg Address stands as A masterpiece of persuasive rhetoric.

In “I Have a Dream”, Martin Luther King Jr. extensively uses Repetitions, metaphors, and allusions. Other rhetorical devices that you should note are antithesis, direct address, and enumeration.