Analyzing Texts and Rhetorical Analysis

Advertising is everywhere we look. It tells what is good, what is better, and what to like. Everything is being advertised. The cereal we eat, the soap we use, and the clothes we wear. Advertising is essentially rhetoric writing. It is an argument trying to persuade you to buy a certain product, or persuade you to do just about anything.

To persuade someone you need to appeal to there Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. Pathos in simplest terms is our emotion. When an author wants to persuade us with our emotions he might bring up something sad, or something that reminds you of a happy event. Logos is your logic. How logically and factually did the author put the argument together? Does the organization make sense? The author needs to pull hard evidence together to be able to appeal to our logic to get us thinking in the same direction as the author. Finally Ethos is how our character comes into play. So for example a military ad might ask what kind of character you have and try to improve it.

Rhetorical analysis is all over in the media. People can literally not go a day without being subjected to persuasions from advertisements. There is no way to escape it. The worst form of advertising is war propaganda. Around World War II there was lots of propaganda for and against the united states. The Nazi’s obviously had plenty of propaganda about how America should be overthrown, just as we had plenty of propaganda saying the exact same things about the Nazi’s.