Great Leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk read the Grand Discourse at the second largest congress of the Republican People's Party, convened between 15 October 1927 and 29 October 1927. He read the discourse as both the General President of the Party and the President of the Republic of Turkey. He read the discourse in 36 hours and 33 minutes in two meetings of three hours per day for 6 days and gave an overview of the events from 1919 to 1927. Ministers, deputies, Republican People's party delegates from all provinces, prominent leaders of the party, senior executives of the bureaucracy, commanders and foreign diplomats were present at the congress.

Since the speech lasted for six days and is a rare piece in the history of rhetoric, it became a part of the literature as "marathon discourse", "message of 400,000 words". This speech of Atatürk is called as the "Grand Discourse" in order to distinguish it from the other discourses of Atatürk.

Atatürk is both the writer and the orator of the discourse.  The fact that Atatürk was a believer, that he defended the problem he believed in and that he was fond of the art of rhetoric since the years of military college were the factors that made his "narrative personality" strong. But, how Atatürk managed to write this discourse as a soldier and a statesman? The answer is that Atatürk read a lot. So much so that Atatürk read about 4000 books on various subjects during his lifetime. 879 of these books, the great leader read, were history books, 535 of them were literature books and 379 of them were linguistics books. It is not possible for Atatürk, who had written six books in the military field before the discourse, would not benefit from these features while he was writing or dictating the Grand Discourse.