Chapter 10 of Thank You for Arguing explains how to calm the audience with a passive voice. The technique works to calm the emotions because it disembodies the speaker and removes the actors. The passive voice calms the audience, which can be seen as a "pathos trick."
The book provides many methods on how to calm an angry person/audience. The first suggestion is to keep everything simple. You need to use simple language and avoid jargon. It also explains how you should keep your sentences short in your argument. Another method is to make your audience feel powerful. This is providing your audience with a sense of self-control. Make your audience smile with humor! Humor also works to assuage anger.
To conclude, the tools for directing an audiences temper are:
Passive Voice, comfort (cognitive ease), humor, emotional refusal, and backfire.
I agree with your point on keeping it simple. Many get even angrier when they can't understand something and then you would have to use more pathos to help calm them down again. I never thought of keeping my sentences short but that would also help keep it simple because a lot of unnecessary can confuse the audience more.
ReplyDeleteusing simple language, like you did in this piece is very important because although I could've followed along with more complex language it is nice to have the same effect and a simple read.
ReplyDeleteKeeping the audience satisfied is crucial when persuading. With an angry crowd, it will be tricky to successfully alter their mindset. However, the techniques you listed, keeping short sentences and using simple vocabulary, are useful in steering the audience's minds away from negative emotions, like anger or confusion. Using the "pathos trick" is a clever to me because of the sentence length. I wouldn't think using short sentences would impact my audience, but I am going to use this going forward, although I hope to avoid negative emotions as much as possible!
ReplyDeleteI think that it is really important to be able to calm down your audience. If you cannot calm down the audience then they will not be open to your ideas/thoughts because they are consumed in their anger. There are many different techniques to do this but I feel like using a passive voice has the chance to backfire on the person and result in the audience being more upset than they were originally since they may feel like they are “being babied” or something. I think that humor is a really good technique because it gets the audience focused on something funny that takes their mind off of what they were mad about.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you saying keep it simple. Keeping the audience entertained is a common way of persuasion because they listen to you more. I also believe people follow along better to simple language than more complex language.
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