TOW #1 "I have a dream" (nonfiction)

The Atlantic Magazine and College Board have teamed up this year to have their first annual writing contest.  The Atlantic asked students around the world to send in their best essays where they were asked to choose a document that shaped the United States, and analyze it in fewer than 2,000 words.  After thousands of submissions, lots of reviews by College Board and Atlantic editors, a student named Nicolas Yan of New Zealand won the contest, and his essay was published in the magazine.  Yan chose Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream speech" to analyze, and did so with such grace that it is hard to believe he is only a 17 year old student.  Yan is top of his class and entering his final year at King's College in Auckland.  His intended audience were those grading the essays, however was evidently the millions of people that read the Atlantic, and those that care about the past and current day civil rights.  He goes through MLK's speech, highlighting its impact, but MLK's diction as well.  Yan writes, "Nevertheless, he now found himself at the wheel of a massive vehicle for change."  The diction that Yan uses here to compose this fluid sentence is highly effective in his attempt to convey the large outcome MLK had accomplished.  As well as using rhetoric to capture the reader, Nicolas connected this past event with current day issues, where he writes "King in his 'dream' speech called 'the winds of police brutality,' such as in the cases of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray."  Yan's initial purpose in writing this essay was to not only to be rewarded and published by The Atlantic, but to analyze and speak on MLK's large development on shaping the United States.  In my eyes, but clearly in the eyes of millions of others, he accomplished his purpose in just under 2,000 words by using rhetoric strategies to convey his purpose, which won him the contest.