Hungry People Persuasive Essay

Do you know what it feels like to be truly hungry? Have you experienced the deep-seeded fear that arises from not knowing where your next meal is coming from? Luckily, I am not forced to answer “yes” to either of those distressing questions and neither does roughly 79% of the world’s population. However, according to certain statistics, “11.3% of the world’s population” is personally familiar with chronic hunger. To put that figure into perspective, 11.3% of the world’s population boils down to “roughly 805 million people who go undernourished on a daily basis.” (dosomething.org) Eight hundred five million people suffer needlessly says the author of the article because “the world produces enough food to feed all 7 billion people…” (dosomething.org) How is it possible then, that we as people, can possess the resources to feed those millions of hungry people but choose to stand idly by and refuse to help? Sadly, by doing nothing, mankind makes a conscious decision to allow millions of human beings to suffer from malnourishment. In 2008, McCann Lisbon, an advertisement company in Portugal, created an ad for the VITAE homeless shelter and placed it on the inside of trashcan lids. This ingenious ad displayed a photograph of a typical homeless man,

This very persuasive strategy is referred to as “pathos” in literary terms. The specific goal that advertisers use pathos for is to provoke a feeling of pity and sadness in its viewers. It can be successfully utilized to entice a broad audience to buy a specific product or to pull at the heart strings of consumers hard enough to compel them to donate to a particular cause, or to strongly react to certain stimuli. The straightforward appeal of pathos used in this advertisement created for the VITAE homeless shelter, was to generate an awareness of the disturbing consequences created by ignoring chronic world