Via NRC paper

As a school kid I read about Rhetorica. Paraprosdokian and such. It sounded rather contrived.
But these speeches show the rousing power of rhetorics. Must be fun to analyse how they work, why they are so effective.

man I've been getting into this whole "thinking about rhetoric" too. My conduit has been the black civil rights era speeches... You got MLK & Malcolm X who are awesome but then you get the Black Panthers who were both fiery and incredibly bright... I'm awed by their power to corral what a schoolkid would think of as boring ("let's analyze this shakespeare speech passage") into something of incredible practical persuasion

I've long harbored a sort of sense that writing as a form of argument has a sort of pointlessness to it, that we can talk back and forth a million times about whether something is possible or I can drop all that and just go try to do it instead (of course I guess in the end it's a balance, you can do something but you'd still have to write about it sometimes). But speech lies in that interesting middle stage--it's direct mass communication but still uses the tools of written argument in an efficacious way