Cultural Rhetoric

On Tuesday I was at Wal-Mart getting supplies for my omnibus art project. While there I kept seeing their slogan conveniently placed around price signs. I saw it by the things that are frequently bought like deodorant, toothpaste, hand sanitizer, Advil, and sunscreen. These common items are located in the center of walkways. Wal-Mart also has lots of commercials on television and ads on YouTube and Facebook, which are also frequented. There slogan is "Save Money. Live Better." By placing their slogan in places that we continually see, they ensured that we would see their slogan, drilling the message into our heads: “If you shop at Wal-Mart you save money, if you save money your life will be better, therefore shopping at Wal-Mart makes your life better.”  Wal-Mart tries to get you to think that through buying from them you will not only save money (because you can save money in lots of places) you do it better while leading a better life. Although I recognized this use of...

Looking up fallacies is always funny. There are nerdy jokes, political argument, and panda pictures. I was looking at some of these laughable pictures and a came across a picture of a panda. My love for pandas immediately drew me to it. Upon taking a closer look I read what it said; "If silent movies are black and white and pandas are black and white, then pandas must be silent movies!" That statement is a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy is an argument based off of an illogical statement or invalid information. A non sequitur fallacy is a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow the previous argument or statement. Basically that means that because thing 'B' has something in common with thing 'A' it must also have the same relation to thing 'C' that thing 'A' has. Just because pandas and silent movies share the trait of being black and white does not mean that they are mutually the same, as we can tell. This form of rhetor...

While browsing on Google I found an old advertisement.  The ad was for Lustre-Crème Shampoo. It featured Marilyn Monroe, known for her beauteous looks and her parts in different movies. One of her movies was Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Lustre-Crème was attempting to sell their shampoo through the use of fallacies. By saying that Marilyn Monroe that tells you nothing about the actual product: it simply attracts you to the pretty face in the picture. Using this as an argument of why someone should buy your product is quite illogical. Just because Marilyn Monroe uses it doesn’t provide assurance of its abilities. They attempt using snob appeal by trying to make the audience believe that they could be like Marilyn Monroe if they use the same product as her. They use appeal to illegitimate authority by using Marilyn Monroe to promote their product. Although she herself is a customer, this is still rather irrelevant. She herself has no type of expertise in hair products and knows nothing t...