Reflective Essay: The Role Of Rhetorical Appeals In Video Games

Rhetorical appeals are essentially the back bone of any type of persuasive work. These rhetorical appeals are known by many as ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is what makes your argument credible, and worth listening to by the audience. Pathos is what appeals to the emotion of the audience, and engages them. Logos is what persuades the mind of the audience with logic and reasoning. Using these appeals and avoiding logical fallacies are what make an extremely strong persuasive argument. My group focused mainly on ethos and pathos in our presentation, where we argued that video games are beneficial. Our group’s main appeal was ethos. We really wanted the class to see us as credible speakers, and trust what we were saying. One of the main ways we did this was by citing credible sources. We used studies done by places and people such as: Oxford University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University

Our group appeared professional, yet Kaitlin dressed up as a character from a video game. Dressing up as a character from the video game helped our credibility, because it showed she knew what she was talking about, and was familiar with video games. For Julianne and I, who did not dress up as a character, we still proved our ethos by dressing professionally. We showed we were taking our argument seriously. The same logic can translate to the way we presented our argument. We spoke in a way that the audience was familiar with. We used vocabulary that was easy to understand, and a tone that was professional yet engaging. If we had to use terms we thought the class did not already know the meaning of, such as laparoscopic and amblyopia, we gave the definition for clarity. Our group spoke with purpose, and the class took us seriously, because we took ourselves seriously. They trusted our argument, because it was easy to understand and they could identify with the language our group