This assignment asks students to analyze the explicit and implicit arguments in “The Gettysburg Address” and determine their effectiveness.

. Locate “The Gettysburg Address” (see Chapter 1, page 8) in our online textbook. After skimming, rereading, annotating, and reacting to the text, answer the following questions in your post:
What are the address’s explicit and implicit arguments?
Are the address’s arguments convincing? Why or why not?
These questions do not have “right answers.” Your interpretation of the text should build from the evidence in the text, itself. As long as you’re not speculating or summarizing, you’re on your way to good analysis. You must reference and cite information from the text in your writing—help with this provided under “Plagiarism and Citing Information” in this folder. The best posts will be well-polished and at least 200 words.
The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty,
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave
their livesthat that nation might live. It is altogether fitting
and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can
not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say
here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for
us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly
advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the
great task remaining before us—that from these honored
dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we
here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in
vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth
of freedom—and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863