Monthly Archives: September 2012

This RCL blog is going to be focused on the aspect of Pathos.

Pathos, to me, is the most effective out of pathos, logos, and ethos. It may not be the most important, but through my observations of speeches and talks I found that what appeals most to crowds is emotion.  You can make all of the sense in the world, you could be a high-standing, trusted member in the community…but if you are boring and do not appeal to the wants, needs, desires, emotions, etc. of your crowd you might as well sit down and stop talking. There are countless examples for this kind of claim, but i’ll focus on a topic we all well know.  Take for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. What they were all about and what they did is common knowledge, so i’ll only mention how they used pathos in speaking.  Both people understood that to gain ally’s and get people to join their cause, they had to speak to a large number of people.  Of course they were good, respectable people (it didn’t hurt to have ethos behind them), and they made tons of sense and packed knowledge and logic behind what they said (they had logos going for them).  If you get the opinions of anyone who knows about Malcom X and MLK, I would bet money that they’d agree on the fact that they were so influential because of the emotion and passion they put behind their words.  They got the crowds going, inspired them and appealed to the way they think.

This is all in a days work for Pathos during public speaking.

During dinner with some friends the other day, a conversation struck up about politics (pretty typical for college students). Now that I look back on it, it was more of a debate. I also realized that this type of thing is obviously modern day rhetoric at work. We have some students defending one candidate and a few representing another, and through this conversation the spirit of rhetoric is plentiful.  It is easy, now, to recognize and point out the rhetorical canons.  For example, my roommate speaking in defense of Obama and his campaign had to know what she was talking about before she could participate in an educated and heated conversation as this one.  Invention and arrangement was something done in her head while listening to others speak on behalf of their opinions before her, so that when it was her turn to speak she could perform with  graceful style and delivery.  Now, in this case memory isn’t very incorporated, unless you count the facts she’s previously remembered about Obama’s campaign. Nonetheless, I thought it interesting of witness the rhetorical canons at work in my natural environment.

I would like to start off by saying that I did not understand why this movie was assigned to us at first.  I have seen the movie before and remember having feelings of disgust for it, but upon my second viewing I find that there was a very deep message incorporated within the film.  On the surface, the movie tries to highlight the extreme cases of violence and racism in certain minority communities. This is obviously the main message of the film, to raise awareness and to try and change the tradition of violence to solve problems.  When considering rhetoric and civic life we consider the effect of communication, or lack there-of, on the issues and violence caused in the film.  The main form of communication seemed to be very basic and crude within the film, including lots of slang and cursing, and was obviously not very well-developed or thought out.  If this was the case and the characters of the film practiced rhetoric or at least communicated with one another better, then all of the horrific violence and racial slander could have been avoided.