Martin Luther King was an activist and the leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He used his charismatic performances to rally people to the Civil Rights cause and maintained that only peaceful means should be used to advance the movement. For his speeches and firm beliefs inequality, he came to be recognized as one of the greatest orators of his time. He effectively used his skills as a church minister to slowly build up his speech, relying on growing pathos to overwhelm people with emotion.
Personally, I consider myself to be a good speaker. I feel like speaking in front of large audiences and in person. I am friendly, charismatic, and attentive to other people’s problems. I find people I converse with fascinating and have a burning desire to discover out more about them. To understand a person means to respect them, to be courteous. I find all three modes of persuasion to be equally important, and I believe that, in order to improve my oratory skills, I need to learn to appeal to a person’s morals and ethics, logic and reason, as well as emotion and empathy. Being a great speaker means knowing which mode will work best in the situation. But among the three, I prefer pathos and logos the most. A person needs to be in a certain emotional state before he or she accepts new facts. And putting a person into that mindset is what I strive to learn how to do.