Argumentative Essay On Distracted Driving

Words: 873
Pages: 4

In the middle of the night, there is a loud banging on your front door. Franticly, you go to answer it and see a policeman as you open the door. He tells you that your loved one has been killed in a car accident caused by distracted driving. Distracted driving killed nearly 3,500 people and injured 431,000 in 2014 alone. The question posed now is how does a community prevent it?
A Public Service Announcement, PSA, can help reduce the number of distracted driving incidents. PSAs are very effective, because they use not only ethos, and pathos, but also logos.
Although, some people may not take them seriously, PSAs have a way of hitting home with a very large and diverse audience
Public Service Announcements are an effective way of communicating
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Johnson's emotional story about the passing of her daughter, got over 26,000 views on Youtube. The reason stories like this are so powerful, is because they hit home with the viewer. The emotion is raw, genuine sadness, and people emphasize with that. No one wants to feel the way loved ones of people taken by distracted driving feel, and that empathy and fear that the viewer has, helps prevent them from driving distracted. Thus, the video and PSA is effective. The Huffington Post wrote an article about distracted driving, titled, "Stopping Distracted Driving: What Will It Take?" Author Jay Winsten uses logos to logically tell readers about the dangers of inattentive driving. He writes, "At any given daylight moment across the U.S., approximately 660,000 drivers are using electronic devices. In 2011, 3,331 people lost their lives and 387,000 suffered injuries in crashes involving a distracted driver" (Winsten, The Huffington Post). Those facts alone are enough to scare people into driving with no distractions, and that is exactly what makes them effective. Just the mere, risk of driving without a distraction, helps people share the message of not driving distracted. The U.S. Department of Transportation's campaign also featured ethos in their videos. His parents describe