Introduction
Today, people can apply various strategies to make their speaking or writing more attractive and effective, and these processes are commonly discussed as rhetorical approaches and strategies. TED Talks introduce influential videos where people share their experiences, knowledge, and attitudes toward different events in education, health care, psychology, science, technology, etc. Some TED Talks may be boring, while many stories attract people’s attention from the first seconds.
Shawn Achor delivered one such story, raising an exciting topic in positive psychology in 2012. The speaker’s success formula may be explained by combining several critical rhetorical strategies, namely describing a need for positive psychology promotion and persuading with appeals to logic and emotion.
The Speaker’s Purpose and Argument
During the first minutes of Achor’s speech, it is hard to understand his primary purpose. He shares his childhood memories about playing with his little sister on top of a bunk bed and her accidental trauma (Achor 00:10-00:14). However, the speaker properly approaches his central idea of promoting positive psychology in human relationships and development every next minute. His goal is to explain why new research in positive psychology matters and show how not only to move people up to the average of happiness and success but to move the entire average up (Achor 05:10-05:15). Although this statement seems rather ambitious, it is interesting what arguments and methods the speaker wants to use.
The next part of the chosen speech is full of strong arguments and statistics to prove the appropriateness of his idea. First, the way people look at their brain should be changed (Achor 02:48). Second, without even noticing it, people are obsessed with all those negative things around them instead of admiring the positive changes that have been recently achieved (Achor 08:58-09:00). Finally, the strongest argument that can be identified in this speech is that the reality does not shape people but the perspective from which the human brain view reality does (Achor 06:09-06:12). All these ideas are so perfectly delivered to the audience.
Rhetorical Strategies to Develop the Purpose and Argument
The choice of rhetorical strategies plays a significant role. Any rhetorical strategy is a powerful communication tool that a speaker uses to affect the listener. In this speech, approaches such as persuasion and description through pathos and logos can be noticed.
In the beginning, the speaker describes his childhood experience for different purposes, including the intention to raise people’s interest and give a solid background for his current topic. His appeal to emotions like “since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story” or “Bobo married Amy the unicorn” causes laugh and desire to hear more (Achor 00:38, 05:47). He also tries to make laugh of his approach to present the information and offers some “fake data” in a graph to demonstrate how people treat research findings (Achor 03:11).
All these strategies describe some events. Still, their hidden sense is to increase the level of happiness in the audience, the identification of which is the primary goal of the speech. As such, this rhetorical strategy of description through pathos is successful and effective because people want to listen to it and do not seem bored or uninterested in the offered material.
At the same time, one should understand that the speaker attempts to clarify the essence of positive psychology and the role of the brain in the interpretation of reality. Therefore, it is necessary to persuade people about the scientific worth of his statements, and Achor adds logos. Real numbers and statistics almost always positively impact people with different backgrounds. In other words, even knowing nothing about the topic but seeing exact numbers makes it easy for people to develop their conclusions. Achor underlines that only 25% of job success is predicted by human IQ, while 75% depends on optimism, social support, and personal abilities (08:04-08:14).
Another interesting observation is related to the role of the brain in processing the world, which works in 90% (Achor 07:50-07:55). These numbers are not difficult to remember and comprehend their impact on explaining the progress of positive psychology and the connection between human happiness and success. The effect of this rhetorical strategy is also significant because the audience gets a clear idea of the topic and agrees with the speaker’s position about the future of research.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the TED Talk by Achor about the happy secret of human success is worth hearing. In addition to an appropriately chosen purpose and strong arguments, the speaker uses several effective rhetorical strategies. Many people find it enough to concentrate on pathos or logos separately, but Achor proves that the combination of these styles may create more positive results.
His smile, articulation, and eye contact with the audience contribute to a better comprehension of his words. His childhood memories and current statistics do not disturb but support each other, so the listener is not bored but involved. These choices demonstrate high-level professionalism in speaking and make the chosen speech enjoyable.
Work Cited
Achor, Shawn. “The Happy Secret to Better Work.” TED. 2012. Web.