I decided to do my rhetorical analysis on the movie, Thank you for Smoking. My main analysis will be about the movie’s man character, Nick Naylor. Naylor uses rhetoric skillfully and attempts to convince his own audience that smoking is not harmful to your health. This is interesting to me because I want to understand how he is so successful at arguing against what could almost be considered a commonplace. Logos, Ethos, and Pathos all appear in this movie in many forms and persuasion is at an all time high. How he accomplishes each of these rhetorical appeals will be discussed.
Some things I am going to focus on are:
My audience which I think will be college students and I will try to demonstrate to them how one can use rhetoric for almost any purpose.
Two scenes I will pay close attention to are when he uses rhetoric to persuade an anti smoker to take a bribe to stop campaigning against tobacco and how he wins his court argument by persuasion and “sleight of mouth.”
An interesting quote at the end of the movie is this: ” Michael Jordan plays ball. Charles Manson kills people. I talk. Everyone has a talent. ” This will also be a major focus in my article because I want people to understand that if one masters rhetoric it can useful for almost any situation one can encounter. This should be a fun paper and also an interesting one as the topic is outside the box.
I think that your argument will be strong as you describe how Nick uses rhetoric to go against a commonplace. His ability to persuade against a commonplace will show his power as a rhetor and the value of his rhetorical appeals. I’m interested in the use of pathos in his argument. Maybe you want to discuss if and how he pathetically conveys his message or not? Does he need to use pathos? Would his argument be strengthened with pathos or is his argument strongest with logos? Just some thoughts!
I think your paper will be quite interesting, however, it seems that you are focusing on rhetorics usefullness when we are supposed to just analyze the rhetoric (in particular ethos, pathos, logos) being used in the piece. I would not talk about how rhetoric is useful and how if you master it then it is even more useful. Just talk about how the video utilizes rhetoric in order to make its case. Try not to make your paper show other people about rhetoric just how it is used in this case.
This seems like it’ll end up being a really interesting paper! Just make sure when you describe how Naylor appeals to ethos, logos, and pathos, you don’t start your sentences with “This appeals to ethos/logs/pathos because…” as it sort of takes away from the quality of the paper.