Famous Speech Literary Devices

Identify the literary device in the following passage: (Scroll Down)

“Do you realize that in no other country in the world with democratic tendencies is suffrage so completely denied as in a considerable number of our own states? There are thirteen black states where no suffrage for women exists, and fourteen others where suffrage for women is more limited than in many foreign countries.

Do you realize that when you ask women to take their cause to state referendum you compel them to do this: that you drive women of education, refinement, achievement, to beg men who cannot read for their political freedom?

Do you realize that such anomalies as a college president asking her janitor to give her a vote are overstraining the patience and driving women to desperation?

Do you realize that women in increasing numbers indignantly resent the long delay in their enfranchisement?” (Catt 3).

• Hyperbole

• Personification

• Anaphora

• Idiom

Tags

CCSS.RL.2.4

CCSS.RL.7.4

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“...if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline” (Roosevelt 4).

• Alliteration

• Simile

• Juxtaposition

• Allusion

Tags

CCSS.L.7.5A

CCSS.RI.8.4

CCSS.RL.8.4

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight” (Kennedy 2).

HINT: Penicillin and television were discovered in the late 1920s and nuclear power was discovered in the 1930s. This speech was written in 1962.

• Hyperbole

• Idiom

• Simile

• Anaphora

Tags

CCSS.RL.2.4

CCSS.RL.7.4

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice” (King 2).

• Idiom

• Alliteration

• Juxtaposition

• Metaphor

Tags

CCSS.L.4.5A

CCSS.L.5.5A

CCSS.RL.5.4

CCSS.W.11-12.2D

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood” (King 2).

• Personification

• Simile

• Metaphor

• Allusion

Tags

CCSS.L.4.5A

CCSS.L.5.5A

CCSS.RL.5.4

CCSS.W.11-12.2D

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream’” (King 3).

• Anecdote

• Simile

• Alliteration

• Hyperbole

Tags

CCSS.L.7.6

CCSS.L.8.6

CCSS.L.9-10.6

CCSS.W.8.2D

CCSS.W.9-10.2D

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born” (King 3).

• Simile

• Idiom

• Hyperbole

• Juxtaposition

Tags

CCSS.L.4.5

CCSS.L.5.5

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“They're half right. The United Farm Workers is first and foremost a union. A union like any other. A union that either produces for its members on the bread and butter issues or doesn't survive” (Chavez 4).

• Simile

• Juxtaposition

• Allusion

• Idiom

Tags

CCSS.L.7.5A

CCSS.RI.8.4

CCSS.RL.8.4

Identify the following literary device in the passage:

“What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil” (Weisel 2).

• Hyperbole

• Anaphora

• Idiom

• Juxtaposition

Tags

CCSS.L.4.5

CCSS.L.5.5

Identify the literary device in the following passage:

“...indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten” (Weisel 3).

• Personification

• Anaphora

• Anecdote

• Allusion

Tags

CCSS.L.7.5A

CCSS.RI.8.4

CCSS.RL.8.4