Shepherd- Week 8

I found that the group who talked about abortion rights to be rhetorically effective. Within that group Dani, who took on the persona of a woman who lived only because her teenaged mother did not choose to have an abortion, was particularly interesting. When she talked of her childhood and how she grew up in less than luxury it was full of pathos and made the audience feel pity for her. The other part of that story, when she explains how she is only alive because her mother choose to forgo the abortion and raise her as a single mother, while not a new story to be told, was emphasized with Dani’s insistence that she was so thankful to her mother for making that decision because it allowed Dani to become who she is today, and that she was so thankful just to be alive. While rhetorically interesting and effective in that the audience does feel pity for her and give her ethos for the topic, this did not sway my personal opinions. I feel as though I might have been more convincing if she had used another rhetorical device such as using restrained emotion (almost crying and so on) as mentioned by Heinrichs in Thank You for Arguing, to further convince the audience of her against abortion stance and make her more rhetorically convincing.