Tay Hwang
English 1070A
Ruby Sanchez
4/18/23
Essay 3
Who was your hero as a kid? Who was it that you aspired to become when you grew older? Every athlete grows up dreaming of emulating their heroes; not many get to actually do it. Rory Mcilroy a kid from Northern Ireland grew up dreaming of emulating his hero, Tiger Woods, and now he is amongst the great. With hard work, self belief, and consistency you can achieve your dreams like Rory Mcilroy. The rhetorical analysis that I will be doing is a Nike golf commercial called “Ripple”. It was released in 2015 when Rory Mcilroy was at the height of his career and on the hunt to be the best. With the usage of both pathos and ethos, Nike identifies exigence, audience, and purpose in this commercial.
…show more content…
Pathos is appealing to an emotion. Laura Bolin Carroll in “Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis” says that “Few of us are persuaded only with our mind, though. Even if we intellectually agree with something, it is difficult to get us to act unless we are also persuaded in our hearts. This kind of appeal to emotion is called pathos” (Carroll 53). In this commercial you can notice that the background music is very sentimental and in a way inspiring. It puts the viewers in an emotional and soft state. The soft piano music with the visuals of a young child looking up to his hero is a use of pathos. Watching a little kid who is about four or five years old watching an adult being the best at his job and getting inspired by that, appeals to pathos. Throughout the commercial you can also see that the little kid is growing older, once a toddler, to a child, to a teenager, then finally an adult, and throughout this process he still holds onto the dream that he created. At the end of the commercial when he finally reaches the point of playing with his childhood hero, right as he hits the ball they cut back to his youth and his upbringing. By doing this they recapture the viewers memory of his past and that everything he did as a child lead to this moment. With the visuals and audio this commercial uses a strong amount of pathos to persuade their audience. Nike’s “Ripple”