When I got acquainted with this task and the course video, I immediately understood what example I would like to discuss. I recently came across the 2019 speech by Greta Thunberg, a Swedish environmental and climate activist. Since I had heard much about this girl, I watched the entire speech. In my opinion, Greta uses all three rhetorical devices quite effectively in her address. Her goal is to talk about the sufficient steps to fight against climate change and accuse the older generations of failing the younger ones and stealing their childhood with their empty phrases.
Overall, the speech is quite emotional, factual, and logically constructed. Ethos, pathos, and logos are the rhetorical devices she uses to sound more convincing and harsher. Examples of the latter are sentences in which Greta provides specific facts, numbers, and statistics to support her claim. For instance, the activist notes that cutting our emissions in half in ten years will result in a fifty-percent chance of staying below 1.5 degrees. Precise numbers make her speech more concrete and reliable.
Further, Thunberg also uses pathos, which adds emotions and expressiveness to her speech. To make the older generations and politicians feel guilty, Greta accuses them of focusing too much on money and economic growth while their children and grandchildren are on the brink of extinction. As for the third element of the rhetorical triangle, ethos, the speaker refers to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which adds relevancy and worth to the provided information. Overall, I would again say that the rhetorical devices are integrated into the address quite effectively to convince the audience, awaken their conscience and desire to save the planet, and fight indifference.