Assignment:
The Three Appeals: Logos, Pathos, Ethos
Identify in passages
Read McCain and Obama's responses carefully and decide whether at each point the speaker is appealing to his audience primarily using logos, pathos, or ethos.
Color-code examples of logos green, pathos yellow, and ethos black. may color different parts of a sentence differently even different words. color code ALL of both answers. analyze how one candidate uses the appeals in his speech. Support your assertions with specific references from the speech.
The Three Appeals: Logos, Pathos, Ethos
In his seminal work on rhetoric, the Greek philosopher Aristotle asserted that there are exactly three ways to persuade an audience. These techniques are known by their Greek names as the Three Appeals:
Logos appeals to the audience's reason through rational arguments and hard facts. The chairman of the Federal Reserve uses logos when he methodically explains that he is lowering interest rates to stimulate orders for durable goods, despite risks to the value of the dollar.
Pathos appeals to the audience's emotions (fear, sympathy, anger, patriotism) through descriptive language. Television commercials use pathos to make us jealous of our neighbor's Lexus, angry that immigrants are taking "real" Americans' jobs, or sad that children in parts of Africa are malnourished.
Ethos is different from logos and pathos because it concerns the person, not the argument. Ethos is about image. Writers and speakers construct an ethos appeal by depicting themselves as trustworthy, knowledgeable, or likeable. President Bill Clinton weathered several scandals in part by characterizing himself as someone who cares about the average American.
Below you will find a portion of the 2008 town-hall debate between presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. The moderator has just asked the following fascinating question:
Read McCain and Obama's responses carefully and decide whether at each point the speaker is appealing to his audience primarily using logos, pathos, or ethos.
Color-code examples of logos blue, pathos red, and ethos black. You may color different parts of a sentence differently-even different words. You should color code ALL of both answers. (I have colored the first paragraph of each speech the way I read it. Feel free to disagree)
Analyze how one candidate uses the appeals in his speech. Support your assertions with specific references to the speech.
Senator Obama
Well, you know, as I travel around the country, this is one of the single most frequently asked issues that I get, is the issue of health care. It is breaking family budgets. I can't tell you how many people I meet who don't have health insurance.
If you've got health insurance, most of you have seen your premiums double over the last eight years. And your co-payments and deductibles have gone up 30 percent just in the last year alone. If you're a small business, it's a crushing burden.
So one of the things that I have said from the start of this campaign is that we have a moral commitment as well as an economic imperative to do something about the health care crisis that so many families are facing.
So here's what I would do. If you've got health care already, and probably the majority of you do, then you can keep your plan if you are satisfied with it. You can keep your choice of doctor. We're going to work with your employer to lower the cost of your premiums by up to $2,500 a year.
And we're going to do it by investing in prevention. We're going to do it by making sure that we use information technology so that medical records are actually on computers instead of you filling forms out in triplicate when you go to the hospital. That will reduce medical errors and reduce costs.
If you don't have health insurance, you're going to be able to buy the same kind of insurance that Sen. McCain and I enjoy as federal employees. Because there's a huge pool, we can drop the costs. And nobody will be excluded for pre-existing conditions, which is a huge problem.
Now, Sen. McCain has a different kind of approach. He says that he's going to give you a $5,000 tax credit. What he doesn't tell you is that he is going to tax your employer-based health care benefits for the first time ever.
So what one hand giveth, the other hand taketh away. He would also strip away the ability of states to provide some of the regulations on insurance companies to make sure you're not excluded for pre-existing conditions or your mammograms are covered or your maternity is covered. And that is fundamentally the wrong way to go.
In fact, just today business organizations like the United States Chamber of Commerce, which generally are pretty supportive of Republicans, said that this would lead to the unraveling of the employer-based health care system.
That, I don't think, is the kind of change that we need. We've got to have somebody who is fighting for patients and making sure that you get decent, affordable health care. And that's something that I'm committed to doing as president.
Senator McCain
Well, thank you for the question. You really identified one of the really major challenges that America faces. Co-payments go up, costs go up, skyrocketing costs, which make people less and less able to afford health insurance in America.
And we need to do all of the things that are necessary to make it more efficient. Let's put health records online, that will reduce medical errors, as they call them. Let's have community health centers. Let's have walk-in clinics. Let's do a lot of things to impose efficiencies.
But what is at stake here in this health care issue is the fundamental difference between myself and Sen. Obama. As you notice, he starts talking about government. He starts saying, government will do this and government will do that, and then government will, and he'll impose mandates.
If you're a small business person and you don't insure your employees, Sen. Obama will fine you. Will fine you. That's remarkable. If you're a parent and you're struggling to get health insurance for your children, Sen. Obama will fine you.
I want to give every American a $5,000 refundable tax credit. They can take it anywhere, across state lines. Why not? Don't we go across state lines when we purchase other things in America? Of course it's OK to go across state lines because in Arizona they may offer a better plan that suits you best than it does here in Tennessee.
And if you do the math, those people who have employer-based health benefits, if you put the tax on it and you have what's left over and you add $5,000 that you're going to get as a refundable tax credit, do the math, 95 percent of the American people will have increased funds to go out and buy the insurance of their choice and to shop around and to get -- all of those people will be covered except for those who have these gold-plated Cadillac kinds of policies.
You know, like hair transplants, I might need one of those myself. But the point is that we have got to give people choice in America and not mandate things on them and give them the ability. Every parent I know would acquire health insurance for their children if they could.
Obviously small business people want to give their employees health insurance. Of course they all want to do that. We've got to give them the wherewithal to do it. We can do it by giving them, as a start, a $5,000 refundable tax credit to go around and get the health insurance policy of their choice.