Errors In Reasoning
Identifying Persuasion and Recognizing Loaded Language
Persuasion is a form of communication that uses reason and emotional appeal to convince a reader to think or act in a certain way. The persuasive writer's primary objective is to inspire action by providing evidence for his or her position and then by using a heightened style that will move the audience. The latter objective can be achieved by using imagery, rhetoric, humor and loaded language.
Loaded language conveys more than its literal, or dictionary, meaning. It infuses a word or sentence with authority and elicits an emotional response. For instance, if you call someone "uncivilized," you're not just criticizing the individual—you're also denouncing that person's background, lifestyle, and upbringing. The words house and shack might both be used to describe the same building, but the reader's judgment will be affected by the writer's choice of words.
Writers in early America used persuasive techniques, including loaded language, to move their audiences; some, like Jonathan Edwards, appealed to their listeners to save their souls. When the colonists had to band together to gain independence from Great Britain, Revolutionary speakers and writers used every available persuasive tool to incite the colonists to action.
1. Your first step will be to identify the way that each author listed below is appealing to the reader. How is this appeal made-- by what method and to what sense of conviction? Finally, you will determine the author's message.
Author Passage Method/Sense Message
Jonathan Edwards from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God "It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hands of that GodÂ…" The author uses imagery to appeal to the audience's fear of being punished for eternity by a wrathful God. The author's message is that people...
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