In December 2009, the world was shocked by Tiger Woods. News was released to the public of a scandal regarding Woods cheating on his wife with numerous women. As a well-known and respectful individual in the golfing world, it was important for him to take responsibility for his actions. More importantly, in order for Woods to keep his sponsors and save his reputation, he needed to apologize to his sponsors and family. His apologetic speech exemplifies his remorseful attitude through diction, or word choice, and the use of ethos, or credibility, and pathos, an emotional appeal, to the audience.
Woods uses penitent diction to demonstrate the regret he feels about his irresponsible actions. He uses words such as “irresponsible” and “selfish”
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while describing himself in order to take responsibility for his actions. By doing this, it shows he understands what he did was a mistake and his wrong doing must be acknowledged. He repeats “I'm sorry” multiple times in his speech to show remorse for his actions. By using repetition, he makes it known that he understands that his actions have both affected him his others around him. Also, it displays the unhappiness with the news coming out and the negativity that goes along with it, mainly concerning his family and sponsors. By Woods saying he is sorry for his actions it shows his sponsors and business partners that he responsible and is getting better. Lastly, he uses many words like “embarrassed”, “not acceptable”, and “foolish” to show how horrible the situation has become through his actions. All of these words have a negative connotation to them which displays his remorse and embarrassment about his actions. The negative connotation is very important in a speech because it shows the public the shame and humiliation that Woods feels about his actions. Through remorseful diction Woods expresses his sorrow and takes responsibility for what he has done. Woods proclaims his credibility, or ethos, to everyone, but especially to his sponsors and family, assuring them that he still can be trusted. He speaks to his sponsors and foundation saying “To those of you who work for me, I have let you down, personally and professionally. My behavior has caused considerable worry to my business partners. To everyone involved in my foundation, including my staff, board of directors, sponsors, and most importantly, the young students we reach, our work is more important than ever.” That statement exemplifies how important his business partners and sponsors are to him and how he doesn't want to lose them. Also, he demonstrates how incredibly worried he is pertaining to how his business partners have reacted to the news. He shows how his foundation he and his dad made for young students is important to him and he realizes his actions need to change if he wants to continue with it. Then, he speaks directly to his family saying “I owe it to my family to become a better person. I owe it to those closest to me to become a better man. That is where my focus will be. I have a lot of work to do. And I intend to dedicate myself to doing it.” This statement relays the message to make everyone aware that his actions will not happen again. Even more, he explains how he knows he made a mistake and needs to fix it. By stating how important his foundation is to him and the numerous people he has hurt displays the trust he is trying to rebuild with everyone since the affairs. He demonstrates pathos, or an emotional appeal, to show how truly his affairs have affected his life and others in it.
He brings in an angry, yet defensive mechanism to persuade the viewer. He says, “However, my behavior doesn't make it right for the media to follow my 2½-year-old daughter to school and report the school's location. They staked out my wife and pursued my mom.” He states this to reinforce how unnecessary it is to stalk his family, especially his immediate family. He mentions how the media watches his wife and mother to display his disgust about the press. He pleads, “please leave my wife and kids alone.” This statement highlights the negative effects of the press on the families of public figures. He is claiming that how he deals with his personal life is something he and his family can decide, not the press. Displaying his anger for the press makes the reader and viewer feel sorry for him and what he had to go through after the affairs with the press. Showing his anger about the actions of the press is another way he tries to persuade the audience watching.
Finally, his sentence structure demonstrates his seriousness. He first says, “I was wrong. I was foolish.” Having these short, choppy sentences in his speech demonstrates the importance on the matter at hand. Then, he states, “I had affairs. I cheated.” Those sentences show how he has taken responsibility for his actions, something not everyone does. Including the short, to the point sentences in his speech makes the reader and audience believe in him more. By him owning up to his faults and realizing he needs to change reassures us as friends, family, sponsors and fans of Tiger Woods to not give up on
him. In conclusion, Tiger Woods’ speech was full of strategic rhetorical devices. His diction, among other things, helped shape his speech the way he wanted it. He wanted the audience feel sorry for him through his rhetorical devices. Along with his negative connotation and diction, he uses a trustworthiness tone, that he will get better and an angry response regarding the press’ actions, which creates a sympathetic listener, to relay to his family, friends, fans, and sponsors that what he did was wrong and he needs to get better and he will eventually. He even uses short, choppy sentences to show his seriousness about the matter at hand. The rhetorical devices were used specifically to influence his fans to keep supporting him, both financially and physically, but, moreover for his sponsors so he doesn't lose their money. Money is crucial to a public figures life. Without money, a pro golfer like Tiger Woods would be nothing. Reassuring his sponsors, and everyone, that he is getting help benefits him greatly by making sure they know to not give up hope on him and to stay with him because he is trying to get better, one day at a time. Public figures need time to bounce back and enjoy the little things again…and that's exactly what he's going to do for awhile.
He listed them one by one starting with his parents, then moving to the organization, then wife and children, team mates and last fans. Telling what each of them had given him over his career and thanking them for their support. He did not speak long on each one literally just one sentence on each. This was a little concerning as he should have been more thankful to those who gave him such a great and long career. It was almost like his speech only had an introduction and then a conclusion as the body was so
In 102 Minutes, Chapter 7, authors Dwyer and Flynn use ethos, logos, and pathos to appeal to the readers’ consciences, minds and hearts regarding what happened to the people inside the Twin Towers on 9/11. Of particular interest are the following uses of the three appeals.
Advertisements are constructed to be compelling; nonetheless, not all of them reach their objective and are efficient. It is not always easy to sway your audience unless your ad has a reliable appeal. Ads often use rhetoric to form an appeal, but the appeals can be either strong or weak. When you say an ad has a strong rhetorical appeal, it consists of ethos, pathos, logos, and Kairos. Advertisers use these appeals to cohere with their audience. Nike is known to be one of the leading brands of the sports shoes and apparel. It holds a very wide sector of followers around the world. In the Nike ad, Nike uses a little boy watching other basketball players play, and as the kid keeps growing, his love for basketball keeps growing. Eventually, he
The author mainly appeales to pathos. She tells a story of a woman being stabbed while her neighbors look on and also, of a man, named Rodney King, who was beaten by a few police offices while ten other officers looked on. These are good examples for her argument but, she uses these infrequent instances to try and sway her audience into thinking that they are common occurrences.
On April 21st, 2010, an American golfer whose achievements made him a legend found himself behind a podium, defending his actions in front of a crowd of family, friends, and a public whom he had shocked. In 2009, Tiger Woods experienced the biggest blow to his career in the form of a car crash and infidelity scandal. Not only was he married with two kids, but he was easily identifiable as a positive role model for children across the world. His actions challenged the core of American morals and raised feelings of contempt among the public. These next 14 minutes of speaking in defense would be Tiger’s only chance to set things straight, his only chance to rebuild his life. Over the course of his speech, Tiger utilized the four rhetorical techniques for self-defense as cited by Ware and Linkugel in the article, “They Spoke In Defense Of Themselves: On The Generic Criticism Of Apologia”. By expressing denial, bolstering, differentiation, and transcendence, Tiger made a plea for forgiveness in his Apologia speech.
In Florence Kelley's speech to the people attending the NAWSA convention, she uses emotional appeal to motivate her audience to convince their male counterparts to legalize voting for women, and also to persuade the males to help put an end to child labor.
On February 19, 2010, Tiger Woods spoke to his fans, supporters, and non-supporters in search of forgiveness. In the speech, he apologizes for his acts of cheating on his wife, Elin. He hopes to change and gain support from his audience in doing so. Woods issues a strong apology by showing his respectable character, establishing culpability in the audience, and utilizing first-person point of view.
Her description is full of emotional words and phrases which enable the reader to feel indignant about the case’s verdict-Nelson is convicted of vehicular homicide following the death of her son. Malchik emphasizes that “[T]he driver who had two previous hit-and-run convictions pleaded guilty,” but the mother who lost her son is forced to be jailed for a longer time. This part of description shapes a poor image of a mother who in order to feed her tired and hungry children, has no choice but to jaywalk. The author explains to the reader that Nelson chooses to jaywalk not because she is crazy, but because of her mother’s identity as well as lack of safer road for them. The purpose of the author is touching readers to sympathize with the mother, assuaging the mother’s guilt, and proving that walking should be human beings’ freedom and liberty. Adding to this idea are words and phrases such as, “instinctive,” “injustice,” “the narrowest,” “lost right,” “Orwellian fashion,” “more treacherous,” “laziness,” and “scorn” (Malchik). All of these emotional words are awkward for Americans. As the author indicates, “[T]he ability to walk is a struggle, a fight, a risk”, which can help to arouse readers’ awareness of protecting their lost opportunities and rights. Apart from these, at the end of the article, Malchik uses several imperative sentences like: “Open your door; go for a walk; feel the spring”, to strengthen the tone. It is also an effective way to attract readers and create strong emotional
In the book Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer wrote about Christopher McCandless, a nature lover in search for independence, in a mysterious and hopeful experience. Even though Krakauer tells us McCandless was going to die from the beginning, he still gave him a chance for survival. As a reader I wanted McCandless to survive. In Into the Wild, Krakauer gave McCandless a unique perspective. He was a smart and unique person that wanted to be completely free from society. Krakauer included comments from people that said McCandless was crazy, and his death was his own mistake. However, Krakauer is able to make him seem like a brave person. The connections between other hikers and himself helped in the explanation of McCandless’s rational actions. Krakauer is able to make McCandless look like a normal person, but unique from this generation. In order for Krakauer to make Christopher McCandless not look like a crazy person, but a special person, I will analyze the persuading style that Krakauer used in Into the Wild that made us believe McCandless was a regular young adult.
To him, there is more to our lives. “He is reacting to the river; in that reaction he discovers someone important to himself; and now he’s fashioning the structure of the piece so it is even clearer to himself and to his reader” (Cool Plums). He knows the mistakes that he has made, but does not regret any of the decisions he made.
According to the text “ there were relatively few stories or images focusing on aging, poverty, isolation, crime and fear, and the ethno racial, or gender distribution of mortality, morbidity, and access to care.” They went to the extreme by looking for more information and pictures with people in body bags to put on their front page. People use the media as their information source to guide them on what is going on in their countries and around the world. What is portrayed in the media is often taken as true even if it actually is not completely accurate. Throughout the text it was clear to see that there is pressure when it comes to the media. News reporter often think about what they are going to present to the public because it has to be brain washing and appealing, but they also want to keep their connections to sources such as public officials. This means what they end up reporting is effected by what public officials will approve of, to make them look
... his guilt. Upon returning to the Devon school, he said that, “The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary from age, enfeebled, dry. I was thankful, very thankful that I had seen it.” This statement reflects how broken down the guilt and remorse has made him even after all these years.
Young journalists can learn a lot from Malcom’s book because it presents some troubling issues. A main issue would be the author-subject relationship and where the writer-friend line exist. The Journalist and the Murderer tells the story of Joe McGinnis and Jeffrey MacDonald. McGinnis is an author looking to write a book on MacDonald who is convicted of murdering his wife and two daughters. MacDonald wanted his voice to be heard, and he wanted to get his side of the story out to the world.
Jonathan Kozol revealed the early period’s situation of education in American schools in his article Savage Inequalities. It seems like during that period, the inequality existed everywhere and no one had the ability to change it; however, Kozol tried his best to turn around this situation and keep track of all he saw. In the article, he used rhetorical strategies effectively to describe what he saw in that situation, such as pathos, logos and ethos.
When Woods was starting his professional career, he was one of the most up and coming stars in professional golf. He had a fresh outlook on golf and was extremely young for how talented he was. Everyone saw the good in him and saw his potential. The media portrayed him to be an extremely good athlete and person when he was rising to fame. During this time, if anyone would mention the name Tiger Woods everyone would think positive because he had been so successful in his professional career. He was beginning to become a role model, at this stage in his life, for many young people and athletes (Callahan). Tragedy began to hit Woods. In 2006, Earl Woods lost his battle to cancer. This was Woods’ main mentor. This, alone, significantly hurt his career (Kelley). Shortly after this loss, it came out in the media that Woods had been cheating on his wife during the recent months and even some while he was away at tournaments. This scandal broke out in the media quickly because he never had anything of this sort happen. He admitted to having sexual relations with many different women, which eventually broke up his family and his marriage. He soon admitted himself into rehab for personal issues and took a leave from golfing for a short period while trying to get his life back on track. Many different companies dropped their endorsements with him so that their name would not be associated with someone who did this type of behavior. His divorce greatly affected his career, even affecting it currently. Today, his endorsements are just under half of what he was previously making (Callahan). Surprisingly, he has not won a major tournament since his divorce; however, he won a few smaller tournaments (Posnanski). This scandal has also affected how society sees him. The belief that many people had about him quickly changed. People were beginning to believe how awful of a person he was. The media was