17.8 Enrichment
Discussion Questions
- How might your audience respond to your upcoming persuasive presentation? How will you adapt to their response?
- What kind of misinformation exists about your persuasive topic? How will you clarify the truth in your presentation?
- What does it mean to have strong ethos with your audience? What are some of the characteristics of ethos? How can you ensure the audience views you as someone with good character?
- What did Aristotle mean by logos? What happens when there are logical missteps or fallacies in a speaker’s message? Why might a speaker rely on faulty reasoning?
- We know that pathos, according to Aristotle, is utilizing emotion to persuade the audience. While we know that emotions are involved in every decision we make, can you think of examples of speakers who are over-reliant on emotional appeals? How are their messages helped or hindered by the emotional appeals they choose?
Activities
- With a group, decide on an app that is beneficial. As a group, create and present a persuasive sales pitch as to why your classmates should buy/download this app. After all the presentations, survey the class to see which apps they are most likely to download.
- Choose a current TED Talk to watch and to analyze. Which rhetorical devices (ethos, logos, and pathos) did the speaker use to persuade the audience? Which one(s) seemed the most effectively used? In what ways could the speaker have improved their use of ethos, logos, and/or pathos?
- In groups, your instructor will pass out a couple of different newspapers (O’Colly, Stillwater News Press, etc.). Each member should thumb through the newspaper and pay attention to articles they would be most likely to read outside of class. Have each group member share which articles stuck out and why. Each group should create a list of the article titles/subject matter. After the discussion, the group should go back to the newspaper and note which articles no one mentioned and which topics were most often stated by group members. Group members should then discuss how this may impact their viewing selections, news gathering, social media feeds, etc. Each member should think about how selective exposure affects them personally.
