John Lewis was not the same kind of orator as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or President Barack Obama. I know that’s setting a high standard. But Lewis was good enough to have spoken in 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the famous March on Washington. And he was good enough to have inspired millions in countless addresses on racial justice and voting rights both as a civil rights icon and a congressman.

Oratory has a way of magnifying rhetorical effects. That’s why I keep my eyes and ears on how good speeches are written and delivered. Readers and writers seem to connect with such close readings, whether the speakers are Lincoln, King, the Obamas, the late pro wrestler Dusty Rhodes, or the young Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg.

I have also written about eulogies and other “final words” as a special genre of reading and writing. I am about to do that again with the final written words of John Lewis. Shortly before his death on July 17, he wrote a column for The New York Times and asked that it be published on the day of his funeral, July 30.

How theatrical of John Lewis. I use that word, “theatrical,” with only its most positive connotations. Lewis’s entire life was a kind of theater, at least as he describes it in various versions of his life story, especially his graphic-novel-style trilogy “March.”

We learn that when he was a boy who lived on a tiny piece of farm in Troy, Alabama, he preached to the chickens as he was feeding them in imitation of the ministers he heard in church and on the radio. If the chickens didn’t pay sufficient attention, they wouldn’t get fed. How theatrical is that?

Nonviolent protests — at lunch counters, on the buses of Freedom Riders, marching for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge — each of these are now seen as vast narratives of freedom, a kind of serialized morality play in which young nonviolent activists risked their lives while their oppressors wielded clubs.

There is something in the law — at least in the televised theater of the law — that we call the “deathbed confession.” In stories, this has a special weight, the truth coming from someone ready to finally reveal a truth, settle a score, or meet their Maker.

If you have not yet read the final column of John Lewis, you can read it here. If you prefer, read it in sections below, followed by my commentary.

Let’s begin with the headline and sub-headline:

Together, You Can Redeem the Soul Of Our Nation

Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

What impresses me is how direct these two sentences are. Headlines can plant all kinds of clues for the reader on what is coming. Some tease the reader with indirection. Not here. These words so capture the heart of Lewis’ message that they could appear on a mural with his image.

In English, we talk about the “numbers” in pronouns. First person singular (I, me). Third person plural (they, them). In modern English, the second person singular and plural are represented by the same word (you). (Interesting exceptions are regional dialects — y’all in the South, youse in some parts of the North.) There is a sense of the collective in the word “together.” But that plural sense in “You” and “Our” transforms into the singular when he speaks in the first person: “Though I am gone I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart.”

Perhaps that rhetorical move comes from church. The pastor speaks to the multitudes but encourages each congregant toward a personal conversion of the heart.

While my time here has now come to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society. Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world, you set aside race, class, age, language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

Rabbi and author Harold Kushner once wrote that if you did not believe in a supernatural afterlife, there were human ways you could achieve an expression of immortality. You could have a child; you could plant a tree; or you could write a book. The legacy of John Lewis will endure for as long as there is American history. But even in the immediate aftermath of his passing, his words have a living, breathing presence. He’s dead, but very much alive.

I often teach this writing move I learned from the work of S.I. Hayakawa: that words exist on a ladder. At the top, the words are about ideas. At the bottom, words are about things. At the top telling; at the bottom showing. At the top conclusions; at the bottom evidence.

As a leader of a movement, Lewis’s life has been about abstractions: Freedom, Justice, Equality, Tolerance, Nonviolence. Those words inspire. But the reader wants to see as well as understand. So, yes, we embrace, for now, words like race, class, language, nationality, respect and human dignity. But we hunger for the specific, the particular. Lewis’s cracked skull is no abstraction.

That is why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.

Emmett Till was my George Floyd. He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison, and troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable reason were the bars.

In this passage, Lewis descends the ladder of abstraction into the world of places and names. It is not about the “you” now, but the “I.” Days before his death, Lewis is still in action, visiting another symbolic place, the plaza where Black Lives Matter is a street-level mural.

More grounding comes in the litany of names — all martyrs in the struggle for racial justice. Perhaps the most powerful sentence in the column is one of the shortest: “Emmett Till was my George Floyd.” The perfect balance of that sentence serves as a bridge of time — linking one generation of outrage with another. Writers know that move: to place your most memorable thought in your shortest sentence.

One other phrase deserves attention: “… after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.” I often judge a writer’s voice by his or her backup singers, the sources of allusion. Suddenly, at the end of a paragraph we hear echoes of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the sacred song of the anti-slavery forces in the Civil War.

Though I was surrounded by two loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle. Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best, shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.

The scope of this paragraph is quite remarkable. It begins with another first-person reflection on his family and personal experience of oppression, only to morph kaleidoscopically into an inventory of racial crimes and atrocities. Lewis sees his personal experience as a brotherhood and sisterhood of all who have suffered racial violence since his childhood — right up to the present moment.

Like so many young people today, I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

Lewis is writing a column, not a story. But narrative elements are so powerful, they can in an instant transport us to another time or place, so we are right there with a young John Lewis hearing the voice of Dr. King on an old radio.

Notice the length of the sentences in this paragraph. The first sentence is 34 words. The last is 29. But look at the ones in between: 10, 10, 15, 17, 12, 4, 5. With the shortening of sentences, Lewis is slowing the pace of his message. Each period is a stop sign. A preacher uses that rhetorical strategy to deliver the most important lesson: “You must do something.”

Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.

John Lewis does something here that all veteran writers and teachers do at one time or another: He quotes himself. Numerous times — once in person — I have heard him use the phrase “good trouble, necessary trouble.” It is fair to call it a catchphrase. Its effectiveness is made manifest by how often in recent days we have seen “good trouble” on banners, placards, T-shirts, and even medical masks.

Repeated slogans can be used viciously — we don’t have to search far for examples. But used with righteous intent, they can memorialize a hero and inspire a movement.

Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.

When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.

In this final passage, we get not just backup singers, but the whole choir. It begins, movingly enough, with an echo of Dr. King, “I may not get there with you,” an intimation of the assassination that would come soon after he uttered those words. Dr. King appears again with the phrase “let freedom ring” — itself an echo of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” — repeated in harmonic counterpoints at the end of the “I Have a Dream Speech” in 1963. Lewis would be the last living speaker at that great event.

In his encouragement of “walk with the wind,” we find an allusion to the title of his own autobiography. The phrase connects to an oft-repeated childhood memory. Lewis was visiting his cousins at a fragile house being buffeted by a violent windstorm. The storm threatened to tear up the house until his aunt gathered the children to march across the floor holding the structure down.

It survives as a metaphor for our nation’s current circumstances. Lewis understood this to his last breath.

Writing lessons from John Lewis:

• Use “I” to speak from the heart. Use “you” to engage the other. Use “we” to convey community.
• Inspire us with idea words, but help us see the thing itself.
• Echo the words of others to sing in harmony behind you.
• Place your best thought in the shortest sentence.
• Plant story elements, no matter how brief.
• Match your language skills to a noble cause.
• Keep writing until the end. Then remember: There is no end. The struggle goes on.

Roy Peter Clark teaches writing at Poynter. He can be reached via email at roypc@poynter.org or on Twitter at @RoyPeterClark.