Martin Luther King Junior - I have a dream

Martin Luther King Junior addressed all that gathered at Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on the 28th of August, 1963. He expressed his views on civil rights as well as freedom and emphasised his dream of a world free of racism. Luther King explains that racism has gone on unnecessarily for far too long and must meet an end. 

The context of this piece contributes to its formality, the domain being civil rights in the field of racism impacting on formality through the use of political lexical choices and discourse strategies to stress the want of a free world. Martin Luther King Junior's audience are thost of the United States as well as around the world who wish to see racism stopped. Its formal register combined with spoken mode and locale of the Lincoln Memorial are factors which contribute to formality through the speech being of 'one-way' communication.

Shortly after the opening of the speech, Luther King uses a metaphor "This momentous decree came as a great beckoning light of hope" which achieves formality through its description and comparison of the subject. This gives the audience an image associated with words resulting in the audience understanding his view of freedom. 

Cohesion is what brings the piece together, 'the glue it is constructed on'. Several factors of cohesion have been used in this speech. Repetition being on used many times such as the title 'I have a dream' repeated over and over again to get his point across to the audience's mind. The repetition of 'let freedom ring' as well as 'one hundred years later' makes the audience realise what the speech is fighting for, bring freedom to the seemingly endless racism that has gone on. This adds to the formality through repeating the idea and forcing it to the audience showing careful planning in the speech. 

The syntactical structure of this speech differs throughout. Opening with a simple sentence, "I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation." and changing to repeated complex sentences through later paragraphs such as "And the marvelous new militarism which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers have evidenced by their presence here today that they have come to realise that their destiny is part of our destiny." The speech then concludes with another simple sentence, "We are free at last!" 

This contributes to formality, helping the speech end and persuading the audience back to the topic of freedom, formality is achieved here through variation in sentence structure, a key element of formal language. 

This speech uses semantic features, cohesion as well as a variation of syntactic structures to come together and create a formal register in order to create of the purpose of an informative piece to inform of racism and freedom.