Post #1 - Holdgrafer

In the book Thank You For Arguing I have learned quite a few new things. I learned a little about pathos, ethos and logos and how these things are used in our everyday lives from radio announcers to advertisements to the books we read. Ethos is an appeal to reputation or character, such as a doctor recommending Viagra to a no-longer-intimate-due-to-mechanical-problem couple because he is a doctor and has a decent amount of knowledge on said medicine. Pathos is an appeal to emotion, trying to make people feel a certain way or feeling to enhance your point of objective in a persuasive manner. Logos is an appeal to logic made to give an audience knowledge and facts about a point or argument a rhetor is trying to convince. This book has made me more rhetorically conscience about what I see and what I am reading, as well as to which rhetorical traps I fall victim to. This will help and aid me in making decisions as well as standing firm ground on my beliefs as when trying to be swayed by opponents. I think one thing that surprised me from the reading is the ease of rhetorical tools to be used in an argument and how subtle they can be, especially in pathos. I also thought it was interesting to see Aristotle’s statement that pathos is the most important of the three greek devices to master, as you can win almost any argument by snatching up your audience’s feelings and playing them like a puppet.