1) I chose a TED talk done by Renata Saled to analyze for this discussion response. Saled uses real life examples of her’s to engage the audience. She does a great job at this. When she describes the life of her friend who was working at a car dealership during college, she speaks in great detail that really paints a picture for the audience and captivates them. She goes on to explain how her friend is brilliant in the field of psychology, and how her friend uses that to gain an advantage of selling cars. All of this description for example. really engages the audience. Renata is very talented at incorporating a hint of comedy into her speech. Adding subtle humor to her presentation is a way Saled explains her ideas to the audience. I think it is interesting how Saled uses stories of hers to express her argument about chance. In the second story of a friend, Saled describes how her friend and her organized an event at the University of Chicago. Saled and her friend would speak at the event on the panel. She describes a risk that her and her friend took to experiment with the idea of chance. Saled and her friend combined their papers by one reading each paragraph off an on again. When their presentation was done, their audience was not aware that any changes had been made their presentation. The fact that the audience had no idea that their presentation was changed was very interesting to me.
2) In her TED talk presentation, Saled uses a ton of evidence to support her arguments..One of the ways that she best does this, is by referring or quoting well known phycologists. A great example of this is when Saled refers to a famous French psychologist, to support her claim that we are dealing with a certain societal obviousness. Her argument is that we have so many choices in our daily lives, some big and some small, and these choices are causing anxiety, guilt, and feelings of inadequacy. She suggests that individual choices could be distracting us from something larger, this is our power as social thinkers. Saled explains that we should focus on the choices we make collectively rather than the choices we make individually.
The ethos appeal (appeal to authority, i.e. to a credentialed expert) is a key element of many TED talks and other speeches, because it’s an easy auditory shorthand–we’re listening to the person, hear them mention somebody we’ve heard of and respect, and expect that they’re making a clear and logical connection between their ideas and this other person’s.