Jon Ronson Speech Rhetorical Analysis

What a game changer this speech was! This speech at first was not very interesting and I do not really know why, but I kept listening, watching, and reading the script…I loved it. The author/speaker’s purpose of this Ted Talk called “Jon Ronson: Strange answers to the psychopath test” by Jon Ronson is to inform viewers of one important mental illness, psychopathy, and his personal experience with psychopathy. What Ronson did was tell his own story experience; that is what made this speech so incredibly entertaining and informative to me. Ronson’s first words in his speech are “The story starts…” to me, this is a real audience attention grabber because they immediately know that there has to be a good story coming. His story of Tony; the man …show more content…
Pathos which is an emotional appeal is used throughout the whole speech. Ronson’s way of using a real life story and making us wonder about our positions with psychopathy. He went for a negative appeal to the audience, as well. To make the crowd feel sorry and upset and over sympathetic of the experience that Tony had with his psychopathy. He used this negative emotional appeal to keep the crowd involved. Sometimes you can even see Ronson pause and make a face like “Yep. This is what happens when you fake madness,” also. Ethos is the last persuasive appeal. Ethos is a way that the speaker makes himself credible and believed. Of course, Ronson did this by showing all of his evidence and having a first-hand story, speaking to Scientologists and having statistics. I feel that the speaker does not undermine his credibility at all because of all his evidence. The appeals also lead into manipulations. As I do not feel the point of this speech was to manipulate anyone, I do feel as if the speaker did such a great job of getting his point across that it almost seems like we were manipulated into believing him. With such great details who would not believe him? His realness pulled us in. He did not make assumptions to make us believe him either, which is a great way to get the viewers on your side. The assumptions he made were simple ones like assuming he had