To Kill A Mockingbird Rhetorical Appeals Essay

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Writers and public speakers often attempt to evoke empathy from audiences in order to inspire action or cause readers and listeners to change their perspectives on the world. One method of causing empathy to manifest within audiences is to use rhetorical appeals, which are appeals to emotions, credibility, and logic that persuade audiences to relate to a message. The novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Robert F. Kennedy’s “Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.” both exemplify the use of rhetorical appeals in order to gain empathy from an audience. To Kill a Mockingbird includes many rhetorical appeals that the author uses to influence readers and cause them to empathize with the topics of racism and discrimination …show more content…
In this quote, Atticus tells Jack that he aspires for his children to refrain from becoming discriminatory against other races after overhearing the racist ideas that many citizens share in Maycomb. This connects back to the claim because the author appeals to the audience’s emotions of desiring to shield family from harm, whether it’s physical or psychological, when she writes about how Atticus wants to protect his children from the bigotry and racism of the outside world by educating them about acceptance and empathy through his own actions. Consequently, readers gain empathy for Atticus because they can relate to those emotions of wanting to teach their family about compassion and better understand Atticus’s motivations. In addition, this empathy can inspire readers to learn the lessons of the novel and be more tolerant and accepting of others. Later in the text, Atticus speaks with his sister about the family’s cook, Calpurnia, to convince his sister that the presence of Calpurnia is a necessity in the Finch household. Atticus states, “‘If anything, she’s been harder on them in some ways than a mother would have been . . . She’s never let them get away with anything, she’s never indulged them
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