If we want our message to be meaningful and memorable, use metaphors when speaking
Here is how metaphors help us as speakers:
- Metaphors create vivid images in your audience’s mind, making it easier to understand and remember your message.
- Metaphors engage the right brain- just like stories.
- Metaphors help your audience to understand a new concept or idea.
- Metaphors help understand abstract concepts or subtleties of emotions.
Martin Luther King – Master of Metaphors
When you examine the following metaphors employed by Dr. King during his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, it is no mystery why it stands as one of the most powerful, persuasive, memorable speeches ever given. He clearly mastered metaphors when speaking.
- …Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
- …came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negroes who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.
- …satisfy the thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
- …hew off the mount of despair a stone of hope.
- …battered by storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.
- We’ve come to cash a check….America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
- …not be satisfied until justice rolls down the waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
- …lift our nation from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of Brotherhood.
- …sweltering with the heat of injustice…heat of oppression…transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
Master the Metaphor
Make your speech or presentation more entertaining, compelling, persuasive, and memorable. Master
