Tannika Embreu
3-18-2014
Professor Catterson
English 1280- Advertising Consumerism in today’s society is a little out of hand. I understand that spending money on goods and other supplies is how most people survive; however, buying things like clothes, jewelry, and other things we don’t need to impress people we don’t know is pointless. In the short story titled The Culture of Consumerism by Juliet B. Schour, she stated that “unlike the millionaires next door, who are not driven to use their wealth to create an attractive image of themselves, many of us are continually comparing our own lifestyle and possessions to those of a select group of people we respect and want to be like, people whose sense of what’s important in life seems close to our own” (The Millennium Reader pages 290-291). The author is saying that we, the people, are basically mimicking the celebrities on television. If we see someone we call our idol or role model with nice things, we would want to have those same nice things as well. Individuals see their favorite actor/actress or favorite artist in an ad and they automatically want the product they are promoting. Advertising is a way that companies persuade a particular group of people to buy something. In the paper, I will summarize Hirschberg’s article named The Rhetoric of Advertising, and analyzing an ad. All advertisements, no matter how different they may seem, are made to persuade a certain audience into buying materialistic items. Hirschberg states that “We can discover which elements are designed to appeal to the audience’s emotions (pathos according to Aristotle), which elements make their appeal in terms of reasons, evidence, or logic (logos), and how the advertiser goes about winning credibility for itself or in terms of the spokesperson employed to speak on behalf of the product (the ethos dimension)” (The Rhetoric of Advertising, 267). The article continues to explain how advertising uses different techniques of advertising and how most ads “short-circuit” the truth. Ads also have a type of emotional appeal which is when the ad uses the word “you”. The “you” is referring to more than one but is comprehended as being distinct and special by someone who has previously formed a connection with the product. The language of advertising is very important. It basically talks about how reliable the product is and how the authors relate Aristotle’s ethos, pathos, and logos idea to advertising. This deals