Going back to the two speeches, I believe each one had some form of all three different appeals. First off, there was the speech given by Fannie Lou Hamer. Her approach was very raw and to the point. She connects with the audience mainly through pathos and ethos. Her details and exact accounts allow her to have great credibility because she was there throughout the experience first-hand. Who better to trust than someone who actually went through it? For example, she makes a claim, "I was in jail when Medgar Evers was murdered". This historical reference adds more verification to the speech. Not to mention the fact that she gave word for word quotes when telling her story, which just further solidifies this credibility. As far as pathos goes, Hamer was able to use her vivid accounts to appeal to emotion, allowing for a sympathetic connection. "I laid on my face and the first Negro began to beat." You can just picture these awful images in your mind and better understand what she went through. The way she puts herself out there creates more trust between speaker and listener. She isn't afraid to open up.
As far as Stokely Carmichael goes, he definitely took a more radical approach, but I felt his speech used a great blend of pathos and logos. He had a good emotional appeal with his sense of humor and his bold claims. The connection to the younger audience was made possible through this. You wouldn't be too serious and methodical when dealing with college students, and Carmichael understood this. Nonetheless, that exciting emotional content was not without some serious logic, which is where he nicely blended in the logos aspect. He makes statements about how a person's freedom can't be given because freedom is something you are born with. This makes great sense because the idea of a person having the ability to 'bestow' freedom on another is ridiculous and goes against the ideas of what this country is supposed to stand on.
It is hard for me to say which of these appeals is most dominant because they all bring something different to the table. I would probably say pathos has a more lingering effect because of that emotional connection. What we feel and what touches our heart goes deeper than 'facts and figures' or who has a better reputation. Hamer is the best example of this because of the way she persuaded her audience through emotion, as did Carmichael. To me, it just makes the speaker/author seem more human, and less robotic when they have this particular appeal.
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2 comments:
I thought it was so interesting when Carmichael talked about how freedom isn't something you are granted, but is something you are born with. He worded it perfectly in his speech, and it really stuck out to me. I also think it is interesting how everyone has different opinions about which appeal is stronger. You, however, made a great argument by saying that by using pathos, the rhetor seems much more human and much less like a robot.
I wanted to add to Jeromy's point about pathos, and how it affects a listener more than logic. While sometimes logic can itself inspire emotion, I would agree that emotion often has more of an instantaneous effect. However, thinking about some of the other blog posts about emotion, and what Jeromy writes, emotions needs to be coupled with logic (or something more!) in order to stick with a person after the emotion has faded.
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