I love how you equate "access" with "reading". Especially given the highly rhetoric tone of the speech, reading it to me would just be doing the whole thing a disservice. A good chunk of what makes that speech successful is his awesome use of rhetoric and repitition to get his point across. It's a really dumbass comparison but IMO Chris Rock does the same thing, he'll repeat a concept over and over to the audience in between doing jokes about the concept. I think these are two sides to the same coin, rhetoric goes a LONG way when convincing others that your words are truth in public.
We studied this speech in my high school, as well as speeches by FDR and John F. Kennedy (sidenote: why are all great public speakers referred to by the initials that make up their name? MLK, FDR, JFK, etc.). We studied the speech to learn more about rhetoric and how an orator can twist common words into powerful devices for convincing you to believe in their ideas.
Oh and by the way? we read it too. This was to emphasize how much more powerful the speech is when SPOKEN rather than read. It's really not that fun to read, the sentences are so repetitive, short and simple that it's hard to believe an educated man wrote them, but that is of course the purpose of such speeches...you speak them in such a way that the simple becomes complex and weak words become powerful.
We studied this speech in my high school, as well as speeches by FDR and John F. Kennedy (sidenote: why are all great public speakers referred to by the initials that make up their name? MLK, FDR, JFK, etc.). We studied the speech to learn more about rhetoric and how an orator can twist common words into powerful devices for convincing you to believe in their ideas.
Oh and by the way? we read it too. This was to emphasize how much more powerful the speech is when SPOKEN rather than read. It's really not that fun to read, the sentences are so repetitive, short and simple that it's hard to believe an educated man wrote them, but that is of course the purpose of such speeches...you speak them in such a way that the simple becomes complex and weak words become powerful.