Having had a rhetoric course before in my undergraduate studies, I thought I had a good handle on what rhetoric is. It was my understanding of rhetoric that in order to be “rhetorical,” something must fit under one of the three categories of ethos, pathos, or logos (defined on page 13). However, I became confused about this during the reading when on page 12, the authors describe an advertisement for an MP3 player. After describing the advertisement, they write “There are no facts in this argument – indeed it is a fiction, a digitally-mastered silhouette, constructed by scriptwriters, graphic designers, directors and others – and yet it is apparently persuasive, since this type of advertisement endures.” (12)
I had to stop and think long and hard how that example could be persuasive and therefore rhetorical, and which of ethos, pathos, and logos would apply. After consideration, I decided that this could be an example of pathos because the advertisement may appeal to someone’s emotional desire to be , as the book puts it, a “sleek, fun-having person.” I then continued to think about instances when commercials and advertisements don’t have an obvious rhetorical/persuasional argument and how these could fit into the types of rhetoric described in the book chapters and the idea that “everything is rhetoric” from class last week.
I was going through different ads in my mind and came to my personal favorite ad, the Budweiser “Real Men of Genius” radio advertisements. The ads trouble me because I can’t figure out how they are persuasive. They clearly must be somehow because all advertisements are meant to persuade us to buy the product being advertised and the ads have “endured” for several years, but I tried to apply ethos, pathos, and logos to no avail. The announcer for the commercials doesn’t have any ethos because we know nothing about him. Budweiser has ethos for being a well-know beer manufacturer, but nothing to that nature is stated in the ad. The ad is somewhat logical as it describes real positions of real people, but it does so jokingly. This could appeal to pathos because it’s humorous; but I can’t find a solid reason why the add is persuasive, unless humor and entertainment are in themselves a form of rhetoric not yet covered in the text book.
Another part of the reading that confused me is that in Chapter 1, the authors state “language is not things, and language does not communicate things or thoughts or anything else. Language is not the same thing as honey or fossils or cold winds, nor is it the same as thoughts or feelings or perceptions.” (23)
While I can agree that language isn’t honey (things), I can’t agree that it “does not communicate things or thoughts or anything else.” I also fail to see the parallel between being thoughts, feelings, or perceptions that the authors seem to try to make with “communicating things or thoughts. Certainly language isn’t things or thoughts, but if language doesn’t communicate them, what does? What would the point of me writing –right this very second and or for any other reason ever – be if it didn’t communicate a thought or a feeling? Isn’t a point of rhetoric to communicate a certain thought and cause a certain feeling to persuade an audience? Without language, how could we communicate thoughts and feelings effectively, or even at all?
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