Luciano Ibarra
Mr. Oviedo
English III AP
1 June 2016
Rhetoric
Rhetoric is the art of persuasive language, which writers and speakers use to convince, their audience into seeing their point of view. They also use it to make the audience do what they want or to think something. Rhetoric can be used in many different ways. Like a lawyer trying to convince the jury, a politician trying to get people to vote for him, or even companies advertising their products, trying to get you to buy them.
A tool used to dissect rhetoric is the Rhetorical Triangle. It consists of 3 parts: the speaker, audience, and purpose. The Speaker or writer is the one performing rhetoric. The Audience are the people being addressed.
Aristotle came up witn3 major tactics for Rhetorical Appeal, Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.
Ethos are the Ethical appeals, Logos are the logical appeals, and Pathos is the emotional appeals.
Ethos are based on the position of the writer or speaker. You may have to establish your ethos based on your credibility, and trustworthiness. This appeal gives the speaker a sense of authority over the audience, because they trust the speaker.
Logos appeal to logical reasoning that are supported by data or research. You can still appeal to the audience even though you might not have any ethos established with them, by making an argument and supporting it with good evidence.
Pathos appeal to human emotions, desires, values, and beliefs. The speaker tries to invoke a certain feeling to the audience so that they can relate to the argument. By doing this the audience with be more likely to trust the speaker, and agree with what he has to say.
Another Rhetorical analysis technique is SOAPSTone. This means Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, and Tone. This technique is used to analyze any texts or speech given by someone.
For the Speaker you just try to figure out their Ethos to see what he/she is like by their word choice or subject. The Occasion is the...