Cheikhali 1 Ibrahim Cheikhali Miss E.

ENGL 1101-017 18 November 2013 Rhetorical Analysis: MDGs Print Ad Everyday, thousands of children and women die due to poverty, according to The United Nations. Poverty has been one of the leading issues of the world. It has affected all major countries of the world, but has drastically affected Africa and Southeast Asia specifically. A print ad created by Millennium Development Goals, organization affiliated with the United Nations, has voiced out its concern over poverty and is trying to bring awareness to the issue. The ad created by the organization appeals to the audience through credibility with the United Nations, use of emotion, and the ethical need of helping the impoverished. This print ad displays its appeal to ethos through the organizations affiliation with the United Nations; it will create a sense of trust for the audience. United Nations is known for putting its energy and resources on dealing with multiple issues around the world. In 2010, there was a United Nations Summit in which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concluded with the adoption of a global plan to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. The outcome document, Keeping the Promise: United to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals, of the three-day Summit, explains that world leaders are committed to the MDGs and have set out a concrete agenda for achieving the goals by 2015. The Millennium Development Goals has gained the trust of many foundations, international organizations, civil societies, and governments from both

Cheikhali 2 developing and developed. These organizations and governments have pledged over $40 billion in resources over five years. The print ad appeals the use of pathos by portraying an analogy, the poor as birds opening up their bills for food and the mother bird providing them with the text, Promises are not food. The text is shaped as if it is bird food, which implies words are words until some sort of action is made. In other words, promises about aid and help are not going to feed the hungry. There could be two interpretations of this print ad. For example, China, India, Mexico, Greece, and Venezuela are located inside of the bird that specifically have issues with poverty and are not doing much about it. In these countries, the governments control most of everything and run daily life, which is why these countries are posed as the mother bird. Or the print ad could be explaining that the poor have no one to help them because in reality, the baby birds are dependent on their mother to be fed and cared for. In this case, the poor are in the need of care and food from all of the other governments and they wont be able to survive without such care and food. But the print ad is explaining that the poor (baby birds) are receiving more promises than food. The image is touching knowing there are people around the world in the need of help to be able to survive. This will get the audience thinking of their children needing their help to survive. Most likely, children will not survive without care and aid of their parents. This will give the audience the need to help these poor innocent people because without our help they wont be able to survive. The Millennium Development Goals appeal of pathos of the print ad is to get the audience to do the right thing through cultural values. On the bottom right corner of the print ad, it says, We Can End Poverty, which emphasizes the issue of poverty is

Cheikhali 3 everyones problem and we as the citizens of the world must do something to solve this issue. The We in the ad could also means the citizens who are politically active to push their governments to help with the issue of poverty or have their governments put pressure on other governments who have a problem with high poverty rates. The ad presents the ethical responsibility of all, to do something about the issue of poverty. It is unethical to allow for a whole population to starve to death, when there are enough resources in the world to prevent such from happening. Making the help of everyone able to provide with resources necessary for these poor peoples survival. Throughout the print ad, the author is explaining the need for assisting the impoverished. The poor are characterized as baby birds dependent on their mother for survival, but their mother is providing them with promises instead of food. The author explains through the image that empty promises arent enough to enable the impoverished to survive the conditions they are in. The situation needs an aggressive action plan implemented by all powers of the world to end poverty. The audience is made to believe that it is us, the citizens of the world, who are responsible for ending poverty and continuing to aid the ones in need of assistance.

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Works Cited "United Nations Millennium Development Goals." UN News Center. UN, n.d. Web. 03 Dec. 2013.<http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/>.