Thursday, November 4, 2010
Appeals to Emotion
Appealing to emotions in your argument means you give a premise that you have an emotional drive to add in your argument. Directly inserting your opinion and your feelings are included into this category. Pretty much if you want the listener to appeal to your argument through pity or any kind of emotion, then you are appealing to emotion as well as appealing to pity. What striked me most in this chapter was the appeal to fear. It is a very manipulating way to argue to people. Basically using scare tactics are in this category. For example, you could say "If you keep smoking like you do, then you will die early like your grandfather did." This a method more famously used by politicians. More recently on television, there were ads that had to do with the recent election. Some ads used appeals to fear against their competitors to sway people to vote for them.
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Hey! Appeal to fear also caught my interest from the other Appeals to Emotions listed in the book. I agree that it is a manipulating way to argue with other people. It digs deep into people’s scariest fears and sometimes people let their fear take over rather than thinking logically of things. And this is how politicians and advertisements attract so much attention and followers. I also used an example pertaining how politicians use this tactic to gain votes from their audience by targeting their opponent and saying that "If so and so takes office our economy will be more in shambles than it is now." This tactic is effective since many people will try to prevent their fears from happening.
ReplyDeleteThe appeal to fear also caught my interest as well. All the others seemed kind of boring to write about. I agree that appeal to fear is very manipulating. Kind of ingenious if you ask me. It is really amazing how you see appeal to fear in many different forms and from different kinds of people. You can see it in the playground, in advertisement, and even with our public figures that we look up to. Adding onto its manipulating characteristics, it is very powerful when used “correctly”. I put parenthesis around the word because I feel like it is abused often.
ReplyDeleteAppeal to fear seems to be popular, especially during the elections because it is something that politicians use a lot. One of the ads on t.v. that is an example of appeal to fear is the ad where Jerry Brown is attacking Meg Whitman by showing her in short video clips stating the same things that Arnold Schwarzenegger used to say when he was governor. This qualifies as an appeal to fear because he is trying to show us that if you vote for Meg Whitman, California will continue to be on the downhill because she is going to run the state the same way that Arnold did.
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