The Gettysburg Address

Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, which we discussed earlier in the semester. At The Los Angeles Times, Ronald C. White has an excellent article about it.  Read the whole thing, but here are some especially useful passages:

We don't know for certain when he wrote the speech, but we do know Lincoln continued to edit his address in the upstairs bedroom in [David] Wills' home, where he stayed the night before the dedication ceremony. He understood there is no such thing as good writing; there is only good rewriting.
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Lincoln rose, adjusted his spectacles, and began: "Four score and seven years ago." The first two words rhyme, setting in motion a symphony of sounds. The biblical ring of his opening was rooted in lines from Psalm 90. Lincoln never mentioned the Bible, but the whole of his speech was suffused with both biblical content and cadence.
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Lincoln, who always chose his words carefully, here selected words that conjured up the call to religious commitment he heard regularly in the preaching at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington.

At this point in his delivery, Lincoln made the only addition to the text he had written. He interjected "under God." Unlike words added extemporaneously in earlier speeches, which he often edited out before he allowed a speech to be published, Lincoln included "under God" in subsequent copies of the address.

Those words pointed toward the next phrase, "a new birth of freedom," with its layered political and religious meanings. Politically speaking, at Gettysburg he was no longer defending an old Union but proclaiming a new one.

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So what should writers and speechmakers see in the mirror 150 years later?

Readers of the essay question in the SAT exam lamented recently that as today's high school students struggle to write comprehensible English, they try to impress by resorting to big words.

Let Lincoln be their guide. He chose his words carefully. In his 272 words, 204 were sturdy one syllable words, the kind he so appreciated in the Bible and in Shakespeare.