Persuasive Essay On Smoking

Smoking Is Murder Secondhand smoke can cause much more damage than people can imagine. It is the cause for severe asthma attacks, respiratory infections, ear infections and sudden infant death syndrome in children. Although the people being affected by secondhand smoke aren’t smoking themselves, it is a very growing problem around the world. There are many big companies that sell cigarettes such as Newport and Marlboro but organizations also exist in the world that are trying to influence smokers to stop smoking. In the very clever and moving advertisement released in April 2008 by CONAC, also known as the Chilean Corporation Against Cancer, the corporation uses ethos, pathos, and logos to express the idea that smoking isn’t just dangerous for the smoker but for everyone else around them especially children. The company’s goal is to influence smokers to stop smoking around them.

(Figure 1; Smoking isn’t just suicide. It’s murder; CONAC; September 16, 2015)

In figure 1, there is a very young boy who is crying hysterically. There is cigarette smoke in the form of a plastic bag, covering his face and suffocating him. His age and innocence keeps him from being able to take the bag off, and it is clear he is uncomfortable to say the least, but he can’t do anything about it. He is crying,

If the organization would have just used statistics, it wouldn’t have been as successful because it wouldn’t have been as traumatizing and emotional as it is using Pathos. Ethos and Logos are also helpful when trying to reach the audience, which is smokers with children, with facts. Anti-smoking advertisements and commercials are very common but are not the only type of ads that we see everywhere. Companies use these rhetorical devices to influence their many different opinions. As the public, we must learn to view them correctly so we are not influenced by the wrong things or