Diet and Hicks rhetoric

So glad to be done with the final presentation! Just a recap for any who weren’t there about rhetoric in diet and exercise…. Logos is used often in promoting diet pills, like I said in my presentation, in scientific factual form, talking about our body chemistry and how diet pills will manipulate our body’s chemistry to produce a fabulous body. These facts may be wrong or misleading, but most of us don’t know enough about the chemical parts of our body that we can’t contest what these people are saying. Pathos is hit on hard when promoting fad diets. We see so many stories where people are overweight, depressed, and miserable for some reason, but the ads tell us that once these people lose the weight, they are miraculously new happy people. For many of us who aren’t happy with our bodies, we want to believe something, a diet, can work for us too. Success stories give us hope and zone in on our own insecurities that we want to find a quick fix for. The success stories, along with the scientific logos that is being forced at us create ethos, making us believe that these diet pill/ fad diet creators are credible and worth believing.

As for Hicks, I enjoyed his comedy very much. It was very creative of Jillian to show how a comedian can be pushing his own ideas and beliefs on us during his act, therefore, creating rhetoric. While I can’t remember if Hicks quotes any statistics in his act, that would make for some good logos. Though the topic may be sad or controversial, by citing statistics and making fun of the cause, but actually condemning it at the same time in a funny way, logos could be used quite effectively to get a point across. I think ethos was established during his smoking bit because he was a smoker too. Knowing that he smoked and could make fun of all the nonsmokers (in a lighthearted way), I think that made doing the jokes he did more appropriate. We know he must experience what he jokes about, so not only is it funny, but we believe all the scenerios he talks about. Pathos was used quite well at the end of his act when he touched on the whole, why can’t we use our extra money to make sure everyone is fed idea. By adding a moral lesson at the end of his routine, he leaves the audience on a sober note so they can contemplate what he has said, and hopefully feel something for those people that actually do need real help.