Miller, Keith D. "Martin Luther King, Jr. Borrows a Revolution: Argument, Audience, and Implications of a Secondhand Universe." College English 48.3 (Mar. 1986): 247-265.
Miller performs a rhetorical analysis of some of the works of MLK Jr., arguing that one of King’s rhetorical strategies was to borrow already effective streams of argument, religious themes, and literary and biblical quotations that his imagined audience presumably already considered persuasive. Thus, Miller outlines four themed assumptions drawn upon by King (“Love,” “Need for Nonconformity,” “Inadequacy of Materialism and Humanism,” and “Interdependence”), analyzing in each theme King’s borrowing practices by providing comparable quotations from both King and his borrowed sources. By placing King’s words next to the words of other black preachers (which King often did not cite),Miller illustrates that King was practicing—what Miller doesn’t name but what we’d call today—“patchwriting” (Howard), what Miller calls “secondhand language”. He further demonstrates how not only did King consistently borrow and rephrase the sermons of others, but King also substantially repeated these themes, phrases, and quotes in his own work over and over. Instead of condemning King for his borrowing and patchwriting practices and for King not citing his sources, Miller informs readers that such approaches to sermon and speech writing were common for ministers and preachers. In fact, Miller attributes King’s success in persuading audiences to his ability to place borrowed and already widely accepted themed assumptions into his own writing as well as King’s strategy for acknowledging white sources, while suppressing black sources:
By adapting and readapting sermonic boilerplate and by refining and retesting his best original material, King successfully placed the strands of his homiletic arguments against segregation into a web of ideas and phrases that the moderate and liberal white Protestant community had already approved….Systematically suppressing his ties to homiletic traditions elevated King’s status as a rhetor, even as he was shrewdly flattering his audiences by telling them what they already believed with words they had already heard. (256)
After acknowledging that “While the appearance of originality was necessary for King’s persuasiveness, skillful borrowing was equally as necessary,” Miller concludes his essay by drawing some implications about teaching composition based on his argument. First, King’s borrowing helps to illustrate how discourse is intertextual and helps us to reconsider our assumptions about generalizations, clichés, and plagiarism. Second, we should teach students the rhetorical power in knowing commonplaces and clichés, in the form of already accepted assumptions, and help our students practice using such commonplaces effectively. Third, instead of teaching invention as being an individual’s exploration, we should focus our students’ attentions toward keeping their audience in mind during all stages of the invention and writing process.
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