Abraham Lincoln was a superb communicator known for his eloquence and wit. He spent hours preparing the Gettysburg Address, but instead of a long-winded oration like that of his fellow presenter, Edward Everett, Lincoln kept his remarks short. The text contains less than 270 words in 10 sentences arranged in five brief paragraphs.

The tightly honed words shine all the more powerfully for being concise. Lincoln sums up the entire spirit of the American experiment as “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” (Paragraph 1). Later, he captures the purpose of the ceremony: “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain” (Paragraph 5). Every sentence is crafted and polished to communicate a particular idea and achieve a particular rhetorical effect.

Lincoln knew his audience well. 19th-century Americans were a highly religious people accustomed to sermons and familiar with the Bible or other religious texts. Accordingly, Lincoln chose expressions that added spiritual heft to his address. He begins with a description of the passage of time since the American Revolution: “Four score and seven years ago” (Paragraph 1), a turn of phrase that might have sprung from a psalm in the King James Bible.