Thursday, November 4, 2010
Appeal to Emotion
The Epstein textbook discusses Appeal to Emotion in chapter 10. According to the text, appeal to emotion is "an argument is just a premise that says, roughly you should believe or do something because you feel a certain way" (Epstein 191). There are several different kinds of appeals to emotion. For instance there are: appeal to pity, appeal to fear, appeal to spite, calls in your debts, A feel-good argument and wishful thinking. The appeal to emotion that most striked me was appeal to fear. I agree with what the textbook says about polticians trying to manipulate and scare American citizens into voting for them. For instance, in this past midterm election there were political ads by Jerry Brown that were against Meg Whitman. The ads showed Meg Whitman saying the exact same things former governor Arnold Swarchenegger said in his speeches. Jerry Brown was trying to scare Californians into believing that if they voted Meg Whitman for governor, nothing would change and if they voted for him, things will be different in a positive way. This ad which used appeal to emotion was obviously very effective because Jerry Brown was the position of Governor of California.
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Hello Rossi,
ReplyDeleteThank you for explaining the definition of appeals to emotion clearly as well as appealing to fear. I thought that your example was very appropriate since we just went through the elections this week. I agree with you about Jerry Brown's tactic to scare his audience versus Meg Whitman's tactic which leaned more towards appealing to vanity since she mostly talked about her experience as one of the CEO's of eBay and made her audience feel reassured since her company is very successful and is an example of how well she could improve California with the wealth and job opportunities she created with eBay. She said that the people of California deserved someone like her who is knows how to run big businesses, create jobs, and who is from the Silicon Valley.