Chris Voss Rhetorical Analysis

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As shown by Chris Voss, word choice and tone affect how a person feels and thinks. The different word tones can be categorized into 3 different types, ethos is using ethical reasoning to a problem, then there is pathos which is the emotional reasoning to an argument, the last type of reasoning is logos which is the logical reasoning to an argument. However, Chris Voss explains many ways to manipulate a person’s emotions or feelings in a negotiation or argument. The main points of his talk are about how word choice and inflections can affect someone’s stance, and how even simple words like the word fair can be used to gauge someone’s stance on something. Of the dozens of ways that people can be manipulated to give a person a better deal on an …show more content…

One such quote by Chriss Voss can be shown here, “I'll say something like it seems like this is important to you and I'll inflect it up. And I can use an upward inflection to encourage you and smile while I'm questioning you. And that will make you feel less attacked by being questioned.”(Voss). This ability to know about the possibilities of inflections will help people such as officers when questioning a suspect, as they can use this to make suspects less suspicious of them being questioned for a confession to a crime. This same situation can happen when questioning someone but using inflections along with changing the word choice to make this a pathos appeal as when a person thinks about it to the point of an officer saying something like, do what’s best for their family. This affects the person as the pathos or ethos argument is going to work a lot better than any sort of logos argument. While this of course shows the power of inflections and word choice in an argument, the same extreme changes can be found in a few simple word

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