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Hannah Young
Julianna Edmunds
Rhetorical Rational
October 17, 2016

Project 1 Rational

The term that I chose to do my project on was one of the three terms in Aristotles
rhetorical means on persuasion, pathos. Pathos appeals to ones emotional side, and since I feel
as though that this appeal gets through to me more than a logical or credible argument, I chose to
do this. When I first started this project, I wanted to make an iMovie, but I found that that wasnt
the best way to talk about this term because a website was a better platform to get information
across to my audience. Also, iMovie was very infuriating to work with. Weebly.com was a fun
and easy way for a beginner like me to make an informative, aesthetically pleasing, and fun
website.
The first thing I did on the website was choose a theme for it. The background that I
chose for the website looks like a cloud of blue smoke, because if we could see emotions I think
that a calm mood would resemble that. The simplicity of the cover page was intentional, with
just the word pathos and a brief definition of the term underneath it. The first tab on the top
right of the page is about that contains a more elaborate definition of the term with a brief
mention of the other two terms in the methods of persuasion, ethos and logos. When I was first
putting this assignment together and I had to think of examples of pathos, the first thing that
popped into my head was the fictional character, Puss in Boots, from Shrek. The feisty cat goes
from one personality to another while trying to deceive people to get his way. The picture of Puss

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with wide eyes screams pathos. Also, in this section, I was able to include two sources and one
fact about how another theorist looked at pathos. Above the picture of the cat, is a button that is
linked to a funny video of Puss In Boots utilizing pathos.
The second tab on the website is the history section, where I talk about Aristotle and
give a brief summary of who he is. Hes contributed to society in so many ways that I couldve
included in the site to make him more credible, but I didnt want to take away from the theme of
pathos. I included a source from Stanford Universities website about how far his theories have
traveled, and included another rhetoric term, transcendent. Here, I hyperlinked the word to
another outside website that contains the definition of it. I couldve left this sentence out,
Aristotle is a man of science, unlike Plato who believed that the truth is transcendent, Aristotle
believed that only scientific demonstration and analysis of formal logic could help arrive at
absolute truth, but I wanted to compare Aristotles views with other philosophers. I thought that
bringing in Plato who was his teacher would be a good comparison because even though they
were both important people who helped shaped our society, I think having their conflicting views
is interesting. At the bottom of this page in bold-faced print, I included a quote from the textbook
that I thought tied together Aristotle, calling his work the most significant work on persuasion
ever. After this, I included an interactive map of Stagria, Greece, the birthplace of Aristotle.
The final tab on the website is filled with examples of pathos being used today in our
society. Starting with a picture of President Barack Obama who is known for his remarkable
ability to deliver motivating speeches, where he addressed the atrocities that occurred at Sandy
Hook elementary school where twenty innocent lives where taken. I created a hyper link to the
words combination of ethos and pathos to the scholarly article in which I found the fact. Under
that example, lies an example that was used as an advertisement for an anti-drug campaign. The

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ad is almost satirical to me; as the line they chose was something that grabbed a readers
attention. Picking bugs under your skin, but on meth it is. The third example was my favorite
one, Ashton Kutchers speech after he won an award at the Teen Choice Awards in 2013. When I
first watched him give that speech I felt inspired and looking at it now from a rhetorical
viewpoint, I see he was able to embody all three methods of persuasion in it. I was able to
encode the actual video itself into the webpage to give the page more life to it. The final example
I chose to discuss was about the film Blackfish, and how it caused an uproar about all of the
animals that are kept at SeaWorld.