Rhetorical Analysis Of Fair 1984 By George Orwell

Introduction

Perhaps one of the best ways to capture the attention of an audience would be to tell them they are doing something wrong. This may cause the audience to become angry with the speaker, or, if done correctly, it may cause them to listen up a little more. Either of these options, anger or piquing of the interest, still captures the attention of the audience. This is exactly what Neil Postman did when he addressed the Frankfurt book fair in 1984. Postman began by telling the audience that the theme of their book fair, 1984 by George Orwell, was all wrong. He told them that he thought another, not as well-known novel was a much better choice, and in his case, it helped to get the audience more interested, rather than stirring them

He used a lot of logos type arguments, meaning he appealed to the logic of the audience. One way that he did this was with some startling statistics. One such instance where this was effective was when he stated “The average American child watches 5000 hours of television before he or she ever gets to school; about 16,000 hours by high school’s end. The only activity that occupies more of an American youth’s time than TV-viewing is sleeping.” (p. 449) This statistic was very shocking at the time, and still took me by surprise reading over it three decades later. This particular instance, and a few others like it, were very effective uses of the logos technique. They really drew attention to how we as a society spend way too much time on our virtual entertainment, as it appears to be taking over our

Postman did very well with his use of Kairos, or situational based appeal in this paper, which definitely helped add more to the overall persuasiveness of the piece. One example of how he did this was when he stated: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.” (p. 449) The reason that this would be effective is because he was speaking at a book fair, where people who care about books and the prevalence of reading in society, if he had done this at any other place, at a different time, it may have lost some of the effect on the audience. His use of this particular statement really would have appealed to the audience at the time because of their interest in books, and their understanding of the importance of