Persuasive modes

Persuasive modes

Persuasive modes are rhetoric devices that help speakers in classifying their appeal to the targeted audience. They are sometimes called rhetorical techniques. In this paper, I will describe how the speaker organizes the evidence used in his presentation. I will also show how she connects various facts into a unique sequence, and the way the provided clusters of information are necessary for proving a purpose. There are three common ways of appealing to the audience, and these are ethos, pathos and logos. My critical questions in this paper will be to inquire how the three persuasive appeals ethos, pathos and logos are used to persuade the audience. My other issue will be to examine how the speaker uses different rhetorical strategies to emphasize her message.

Persuasive appeals are used by authors to capture the audience’s attention so that they can stick around and read the complete piece. To achieve this, the author must be aware of the audience’s interest and curiosity. In the article ‘The Beauty of Being Bilingual’ that was published in 20th September 2019 and narrated by Natalia Sylvester, the audience is persuaded to see her claim of the beauty of being bilingual. The presenter is a Peruvian-American writer who can speak both English and Spanish. Throughout the piece, she argues that being bilingual is important because it helps in situations where an understanding needs to be established between members of the two different races. Her audience constitutes of the Spanish people, the Americans and people that can speak both Spanish and English. Her targeted audience is evident when she provides proof of her personal experience in different situations where she interacts with both Americans and the Spanish and acts as an interpreter.

The author uses ethos, pathos, and logos to appeal to the audience. She also uses various rhetorical strategies to emphasize her claims and make the audience agree with them. She is aware of the tension that exists between the Spanish people and the Americans in terms of the language difference, and she carefully chooses how to use the rhetorical strategies and mix them to capture the audience’s attention. She uses pathos to get an emotional response from the audience. Pathos is a technique where the author relies on the audience’s emotion to appeal to them.

When the author gives a touching story of her background where her mother made every effort to ensure that they did not forget Spanish, it creates an emotional attachment with the audience. She explains the struggles she faced together with her sister and mother in their one-bedroom apartment in her childhood years, where her mum forced them to speak Spanish at home. Every time they spoke English, her mother would say “No te entiendo”. This meant that she did not understand English. By the use of Spanish in her article, the speaker gains the trust of the audience since she proves her ability of speaking the foreign language. The emotions of the audience are raised when she says despite their struggle to speak both languages, they graduated from English “in record time”. By using the phrase “record time”, the author uses hyperbole as a rhetorical strategy where she exaggerates the time it took for them to graduate from English. The emotional attachment created by the author from her background and the use of hyperbole appeals to the audience to follow on the remaining part of the story.

She also uses pathos to persuasively appeal to the audience when she described a scenario when she worked at Goodwill, where a young mother came to shop at the store and needed her help. The young mother wanted to leave a diaper bin next to the register because it was cumbersome for her as she shopped. The author says she struggled to push her baby’s carriage while buying. At the same time, she was “lugging the big box.” The author raises the emotions of the audience by painting to them a picture of how the cashier from Goodwill refused to grant her permission to leave the bin next to the register. It was despite the difficult time she was experiencing. This was because of a misunderstanding in terms of language where both the young woman and the cashier could not understand each other. However, the author retains the audience’s attention by showing how she helped in this crucial moment. Because of her bilingual ability, she was able to help in the situation by interpreting the Spanish words the young woman was saying to the cashier who only understood English. It created a happy feeling for the audience to know that someone needed help and received it.

The other persuasive appeal the author uses is logos. It is a technique where facts or figures are used by the author to support their claim. It appeals to the audience because the facts presented by the author makes the author look prepared and knowledgeable. It is vital for the data to be accurate. The author provides a fact that bilingual people face challenges everywhere. She achieves this by quoting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a popular representative for New York. The representative said on Twitter that Spanish was her first language while she was growing up. She says she has to “continuously work” on it so that she improves. It is a fact presented to the audience to support claims by the author that being bilingual is beneficial, and notable figures work hard at it to become better and more useful. By quoting a renowned figure, the author appeals to the audience because she did research and prepared before writing the article.

Logos is also used to appeal to the audience where the author makes reference to videos on social media that are circulating where we see Americans harassing Spanish people at restaurants and supermarkets. The author shows a fact because the videos show white supremacy and are among the causes of strain between the Americans and Spanish people. It is because of the communication barrier. The audience gets appealed because they can prove these facts by visiting YouTube and searching for these videos to verify the information presented by the author.

The author also uses ethos as an effective appeal means by proving her credibility to the audience. Ethos is crucial because it makes the author appear trustworthy in front of the audience. She uses historical facts to show how Spanish people have had a long journey to learn English in order to fit in society and become useful in various situations. The author says they get laughed at when they visit their cousins in Latin America. She even goes one generation down the line when children were beaten in Florida for speaking Spanish. She then goes even further to another generation below that where Mexicans were subjected to a state-sanction. It was because of their race in the late 1800 in Texas. This makes the audience trust the author because this are historical facts that happened. Lastly, the presenter uses amplification as a rhetorical strategy when she says she used to think that the reason she thought she was a writer because she was bilingual, but she now sees it is more and more deep than that. She repeats the word “more and more” to emphasize her point and keep the audience hooked until the end.

In conclusion, modes of persuasion are rhetoric devices that help speakers in classifying their appeal to the targeted audience. They are sometimes called rhetorical techniques. The three common ways of appealing to the audience are ethos, pathos and logos. In the article ‘Beauty of Being Bilingual’, the author uses pathos when she gives a touching story of her background where her mother made every effort to ensure that they did not forget Spanish. She uses logos when she provides a fact of how bilingual people face difficult challenges by quoting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a famous representative for New York. She uses ethos by using historical events to show how Spanish people have had a long journey to learn English to fit into society and become useful in various situations. Persuasive appeals are used by authors to capture the audience’s attention so that they can stick around until the end of the presentation. To achieve this, the author must be aware of the audience’s interest and curiosity.