2). Pertaining to page 195, complete objective 1, 2, 3, 6 OR 7.
3. Find an advertisement that uses an appeal to fear. Is it a good argument?
The advertisement above promotes the anti-smoking campaign that smoking kills. Most people are afraid of death, and so by placing the individual’s hand in the shape of a gun, while holding a cigarette with a shadow of a gun in the background, an appeal to emotion is created: the appeal to fear. The appeal to fear is a tool that both advertisers and politicians use to manipulate people into believing that they should do or believe something based on fear. The unstated conclusion in this case based on fear would be that, smoking cigarettes is like killing yourself with a gun. In addition to the statistic that is presented in the advertisement, the overall image creates a sense of fear to those who are thinking of smoking or who are smokers. I believe that this is a good argument because it is not “substituting one legitimate concern for all others, concluding our minds to alternatives” (Epstein). This advertisement is promoting that smoking is deadly and can be like holding a gun in your hand and provides the added statistic that about 106, 00 people in the UK die each year due to smoking making this advertisement not just based on fear, but on reality. If this advertisement just simply had the picture of the individual and the gun, then it would have been “concluding our minds to alternatives.” However, since it didn’t, this advertisement, which is based on appeal to fear, gives us good reason to believe why smoking is something that should be feared and is something we shouldn’t do.
Hello Gracie!
ReplyDeleteI thought that your picture was a very good example of an appeal to fear. I was thinking about blogging about an advertisement like that but I could not find images as good as yours. I did however talk about appeal to fear and our ideas are pretty much the same. We explained a lot of the same reasoning. I went on to say that appeal to fear is a little bit like bullying. Just because you are manipulating someone by the use of fear; and to me that is sort of a way of bullying... Anyways good post and keep up the good work!