Lailah Johnson – Rhetorical Analysis – Group 16

Thesis statement: Chabris and Simons use rhetoric in their New York Times article on memory to appeal to the readers. They utilize logos, pathos, and ethos in order to convince the reader of their findings. (Not a true thesis statement! Reread your class notes on thesis)

The arguments Chabris and Simons present are appeals to logos, pathos and ethos. They reference several psychological studies and panels discussing memory, one of which included one of the authors. This is a clear appeal to logos, giving the reader case studies and experiments to reference on top of the authoritative voices from the mentioned psychologists and the authors themselves. The constant recollection of pop culture appeals to pathos, it connects the reader to emotional memories that are attached to a show or movie they may have seen. Chabris and Simons are both professors of psychology, this immediately gives them a level of credibility for the reader to trust what they have to say about memory, thusly appealing to ethos. 

The three reader-picked top comments were left by one Neil deGrasse Tyson, a user named Keith Dow and another named Jacob Sommer. Tyson’s comment links two Facebook posts that I assume he hopes will justify his mistakes. The initial comment left on the op-ed is an appeal to logos and ethos. He is trying to say that he has answered these questions several times and here are some sources to prove it. However, if you open the links that he attached I find that they do a poor job of explaining away any of the misspoken statements. The posts themselves are again not based in any factual evidence that can be found and verified, it all comes from his own memory. He repeats this point and I think it is an emotional appeal to say, “I’m only human, I make mistakes” but he also continues saying he remembered this as if him just being him is enough for the audience to believe and trust his words. Therefore, the Facebook posts receive different analysis of appealing to pathos and ethos. Dow’s comment appeals to the reader using ethos. Dow himself is not a credible source so he instead links to a website that can verify the multitude of questionable quotes made by former president George W. Bush. He creates a sense of trustworthiness by including reliable sources and testimony from the president himself, He does this all to discredit the statement of Chabris and Simons that Bush was an intelligent person. Sommer’s comment appeals to the reader using logos. He argues that most people have a very poor memory and can hardly remember everything that happens to them within a single day, including himself.  He tries to logically correlate his experiences to those of the reader and uses personal anecdotes to connect to the reader as if to say, “I know you’ve been there because I certainly have and I can’t be the only one”.

Personally. I’m not sure what the comment ranking system is supposed to achieve. It appears to be the same as a YouTube comment section in that the most liked comments become the top comment but being most liked doesn’t equate to the content of the comment. Whether the top comments are chosen y the editors or by the other commenters, bias is always inevitable.

Hi Lailah,

Overall good post. I’d like to see more analysis than summary. Good writing style, sentence structure and word choice. You did a very good job on the reader comments however, but not much on the actual rhetoric triangle.