This week I read 6 Ways to Get Anyone to Believe a Clearly Fake News Story, which explained to me different ways that could be used to develop fake news stories. It mentioned that our society is ignorant on a lot of subjects and we are also to lazy to research what we read, so believing crazy stories happened to us many times before. I noticed as I was reading that a lot of the topics connected to the appeals. For example, one of the topics was about how we make specific studies more general to make it appealing to the reader. This appealed to the logos by sounding so smart that people do not understand you, but still believe whatever you say. Also, the article talked about how heart-wrenching stories made many believe stories that weren't true and I thought that that was a demonstration of how pathos is the most powerful appeal.
The author of the piece was Christina H, she has written many other pieces for cracked that have been viewed by millions of people. This piece was written in a time where Americans have all of the resources they need to research everything at the tips of their fingers, but never do because they are too lazy. This helped give the article a little humor because they had examples of news articles that weren't true. The reason this article was written was to provide the lazy American a realization of how lazy they are and hopefully change so we do not make mistakes like believing these news articles again. The audience that it was written for was the average, lazy American who believe everything they read, no matter how crazy the stories are. Rhetorical elements in the piece were in the ways to get people to believe clearly fake news stories. One point was that exaggerating scientific breakthroughs works because people do not know much on the subject, so the reader feels like the evidence applied to the logos. Also, the article said that heart-wrenching stories work because people do not want to sound heartless by denying them; this is also an application to pathos. The author reached their purpose because they effectively made me a little paranoid about where the articles I read are coming from and gave me a motivation to research the stories instead of just believing everything I read.
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