In the reading, the author discusses how pathos in an ad can make us almost trust the ad before researching it ourselves. We can't question every statement and trace their sources back to where they originated, so we believe the ads. The bigger the company or more popular the name, the more we tend to trust them. It's a simple concept, but at the same time can be difficult to understand why we don't believe small companies or less popular people as much as bigger ones. But in reality, why do we trust bigger companies? Because they have more to lose? They've made more ads in their history?Aren't the smaller ones just as reputable?
I absolutely cannot disagree with your point that you made about pathos ads having no logos embedded within them. Most people do not see any logos because it's not necessarily physically visible to them. Many pathos arguments rely on some logos to give the audience some logical reasoning which also relays some emotion to them. For example, the Holocaust is an event that really happened, and it also brought tears to many people around the world because it happened. The same concept applies to pathos ads; a lot of the emotional arguments almost always rely on logical reasoning... except for those Peta ads. Even if evidence and such are not concrete in these pathos ads, mostly they are embedded abstractly within. The advertisement you have above is an example even if it is in Mandarin Chinese. From anyone's viewpoint, it looks like an innocent child in poverty painted on a punching bag. What do people do with punching bags? We punch them, which is why they're called what they are. From there, we can all relay an image of a child being beaten up. In America, we see that as something that happens quite often, that not many people seem to take an action on, which those are our logos. From the abstract logos, we are convinced through emotion to stop child abuse, which is how this ad and many other pathos arguments work.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your questions, as rhetorical as they may be, in last couple of sentences, we tend to trust bigger companies because they're more reputable and many other people rely on them. You can see this as a phone's app market; If you like an app in the market, you would probably check how many other people have this on their phone to make sure that there likely won't be any viruses on the app. Businesses are the same; more people depend on bigger companies because they are, as you said, more reputable. If large companies were to give out "viruses", no one would recommend it to others. However, this does not mean that these large companies will keep their promises to their consumers; take Peta for example. I don't know the exact history of it, but I know that it doesn't treat animals as well as they say they do in ads. The smaller companies should be as reputable, it's just that not many people have recommended it or their ads are just not as branched out. However, I agree that certain small businesses deserve the same reputation as a larger business selling the like.
I think your piece is okay. I think it ended on a really short note. I was a little confused on the entire topic of the subject. But it did also bring up some good points. Pathos is one of the most popular types of appeal in a visual argument, also the most easiest to spot. I think your piece would have been more effective if you went into more detail about the definition of pathos, and explain how people use it. You also brought up ethos, pathos, and kairos, but you didn’t really go into detail about it. For future pieces, going into more detail will help the reader in following your piece and understand the point you are getting across. I would suggest telling your audience what these terms mean, give an example of what they are, and explain the significance of them to your article. Maybe to make this piece more pleasurable, you could have answered the questions you posed in the last paragraph. I think it would have improved your writing significantly. The audience would have had more of an understanding to the points you were trying to pose. Overall, you didn’t do too badly in your blog post. The introduction was easy to read and was pretty easy to get into it. The piece was on the shorter end, which was also a plus (though it could have been a little more in depth). Voice was also an extremely posed in your article. Good job.
ReplyDelete@Dani, I chose to end it so abruptly and not answer the questions to allow my audience to think about it for themselves. I could have answered it giving my opinion, which is that the bigger companies have a higher reputation on the line and more money to advertise with, so they become household names that everyone is familiar with. But then the reader might not pause to think about how he/she felt about it, they would just rely on my opinion and agree with what I have to say. I'm sure some others do have a similar opinion, but they would be forced to conclude that on their own, not with my influence that they would just have to simply comply to. Granted, it was on the shorter side, and going more into detail about pathos and the other appeals could have been beneficial to the post. I agree that would have boosted the effectiveness of the point I was trying to make, but I was going for a short, concise topic that left room for the reader to think on his own about what pathos did to an ad as opposed to logos, and how both could be incorporated into a single ad effectively. In retrospect, giving an example of an ad that mainly emphasized logos with a small bit of pathos to counter-balance my ad that was clearly more relied on pathos could have been a good way to illustrate my topic. Thank you for your feedback, next post I will be sure to put more thought and consideration into explaining the details before beginning to make claims!
ReplyDelete@Tyler Original Post Your post about Pathos was quite interesting. Although it did kind of end on a short note i felt the analysis was very accurate and agree with your views. Pathos requires your emotion to act before any other act can be revealed. The one part i do not really agree with is that the bigger the company the more we tend to trust them. I believe the bigger the company the more fraud and less respect they have for the individual customer. Companies like Mcdonalds and Pepsi tend to look at each customer more as a number then an actual human being. They have experts critique us like we are a math function to see what appeals to our emotions. They do a great job at it but i am more about putting my trust and money into small business because they are what America runs on. I want to analyze on your question of why do we trust the big companies so much. I think the reason why we give our trust so much into the billion dollar companies is because that is what we know and we know what were gonna get. When you go to Mcdonalds you know exactly what you get whether its chicken nuggets or a big mac. The smaller business that you have not seen before could be the best food you have ever eaten but because of the uncertainly you question it. It is a sad thing to realize but true.
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