Cultural Rhetoric

Today I watched a Wendy’s commercial called “Where’s the Beef?”. It was about a bunch of old ladies eating a burger from another restaurant. The burger looks pretty big, and the ladies make statement after statement about how big and fluffy the bun is. The lady in the middle then lifts the bun off the burger, and the lady to the right asks “Where’s the beef?” because the actual burger is tiny compared to the bun. The middle lady then leans in to take a closer look because the burger is so “tiny”.  The commercial was trying to persuade people to buy the Wendy’s burger instead of any other fast food burger. They used Logos by saying that the Wendy’s burger is larger than both the big mac and the whopper, but they use it in a manipulative way. The burger in the commercial that is supposed to be from another fast food restaurant isn’t actually a burger from one of those restaurants, they just want you to think that it is, and believe that the Wendy’s burger is actually the biggest. ...

The debate I watched was a Ted Talk about nuclear energy. It was a debate between 3 different people. The debate started by taking a vote to see how much of the audience supported nuclear energy and how much of the audience despised it. One of the speakers has a use of ethos, by telling about his background to make him seem much more smart and credible. They also used pathos to effect the audience's emotion by telling of all of the negative side effects of nuclear energy. They used a lot of data charts to show that what they were talking about which helped a lot. I personally think that we should try to be more eco-friendly with our energy. Nuclear energy is extremely harmful to the environment. I think that we should switch to wind energy, or even solar energy. Wind energy may take up a lot of space, and solar energy may be expensive but they would both be so much better for the environment. At the end of the video they asked people to raise their hands if they changed their mi...

For the second quarter, we had to analyse rhetoric in a sermon. I chose a sermon by Todd White that is called “Being angry with God”. In the sermon, Todd White talks about how bad stuff happens and results in us being angry with God. He preaches that this is not God’s doing. He used many examples of rhetoric. Todd White talks in low style throughout the whole sermon to relate more to the audience. This made it much easier to pay attention and not find distractions. He used pathos throughout the whole sermon, telling jokes and stories. He told a story about spreading the word of God to a young girl at a clothing store. He told her that Jesus loves her and she replied “No, I don’t believe in any of that stuff.” Todd then told her that she is mad at God because of tragedies that had happened in her life. She looked at him and cried and realized that he was right. It was a really powerful story that had a big effect on emotion. He made plenty of jokes and made people laugh throughout th...