- [David] Hello readers.
You ever see one of those videos
where you think you're looking at a shoe
and someone takes a knife to it
and it's actually cake?
That's what this video is about, identifying
when an author tries to pass off one kind of text
as another, cleverly hiding their point of view,
this shoe is actually cake,
this informational text is actually an argumentative one.
This is a rather underhanded sort of rhetoric,
and when I say rhetoric,
I mean the art of persuasive speech or writing.
Rhetoric includes a wide range of tactics, right?
From figurative language to appeals
to the reader's emotions
or logic,
using heart-wrenching imagery, invoking statistics.
These are tools in the rhetorical toolkit
and sometimes writers can use those tools
to hide their viewpoint.
Here, let me give you an example, which
for the record does not represent the views
of either Khan Academy or me,
and is provided for training purposes only,
here we go.
The facts on American poverty.
According to the US census,
the poverty rate in the year 2022 was 11.5%
or 37.9 million people,
but 89% of American households have air conditioners,
according to the US Energy Information Administration
and fully 99.4% have at least one electric refrigerator.
Both of these technologies were luxuries a century ago.
The American standard of living is high,
even the percentage of households living
in conditions deemed food insecure
by the USDA was a mere 12.8% in 2022.
In 2002, 20 years prior, the USDA claimed that only 11.1%
of American households were food insecure.
It may be the case that impoverished
is a term that does not accurately describe these Americans.
Whoof, okay, so that excerpt is trying to argue
by snowing us under with context less facts
that poverty doesn't really exist
at the rate we think it does.
I'm gonna go through
and pick out some rhetorical techniques
that will tell us that this is an argumentative essay
and not just an unbiased informational one.
Here we go.
So the thing the author of this passage wants
to do is create doubt.
Look at how they're doing that.
We've got these quotation marks
in the title around poverty,
which is what they used
to call scare quotes.
Scare quotes are meant to cast doubt on an idea.
So already this shows that the author wants you to think
that poverty isn't real, right,
so-called poverty.
The passage also includes other words
that are chosen to downplay poverty.
The words mere
and only a mere 12.8%
of the population in 2022 is 12.8%
of 333.3 million people,
so like 42.6 million people,
that doesn't sound mere to me,
that's a ton of people.
So the author is trying to minimize something
that many people agree is horrible, millions
of people going hungry.
The passage uses a rhetorical appeal
to the sense of logos, of reason,
it's trying to satisfy the desire for facts
and figures using all these stats.
Presenting this data gives the passage
a feeling of accuracy and truthfulness,
but do those numbers tell the full story?
Sure, people might have refrigerators,
but can they afford food to put in them?
Here, the text gives the reader a reason to say,
"We can all agree that poverty is terrible,
but what if there aren't as many poor people as we fear?"
And operating from that basis allows you to say,
"Well, maybe we're wasting money on anti-poverty programs."
It is true that Americans have appliances,
but is it accurate to say that simply
because 89% of US households have an air conditioner
that those households don't experience poverty?
Is one thing a good measure of the other?
I think the author of the piece expects the reader
to make the correlation that if you have AC
and a fridge, you can't really be considered poor.
But is that a common way of measuring poverty
or is someone's family income perhaps
a more accurate way to measure that?
Notice that income or money is never mentioned.
Why is that?
It claims to be a fact sheet
that's really presenting an opinion on poverty.
Once you know to look for this trick,
you'll start seeing it everywhere,
writers using rhetoric to present their biased arguments
as unbiased fact.
So next time you're reading an article, ask yourself,
what are the techniques that the authors use
to try to convince their audience?
What facts are the authors including
and what facts are they not including?
Are they truly providing objective, unbiased information,
or are they disguising their biases
and opinions using rhetoric?
Keep a sharp eye out readers,
watch out for cake disguised as shoes.
You can learn anything, David out.