For this first blog post I will analyze first of all the presidential nomination speech of John McCain. If you wish to read a full transcript go to "http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/john_mccains_acceptance_speech.html"

With the presidential elections coming up in three weeks from this Sunday I thought it would be reasonable to choose to do an analysis on this candidates acceptance speech.

Through out his speech senator McCain uses mostly the rhetorical concept of Pathos. For example when he starts talking about his parents he makes use of pathos,
"When I was growing up, my father was often at sea, and the job of raising my brother, sister and me would fall to my mother alone. Roberta McCain gave us her love of life, her deep interest in the world, her strength, and her belief we are all meant to use our opportunities to make ourselves useful to our country. I wouldn't be here tonight but for the strength of her character."
He uses words such as love, deep interest, strength, and belief to create this effect. It seems like he is just telling us that his mom raised him but we also get the feeling of strength and compassion, sort of, when we hear of a hard working mother who raised three kids on her own.

If you can find more paragraphs or sentences that appeal to pathos feel free to post them up as a comment. As we look closer at McCain's speech we can see that he doesn't really want to rely on the facts that he is going to use. He has the crowd so overwhelmed with feeling that he doesn't need to, because he has the audience so stuck on feelings of victory and patriotism.

When it comes to John McCain explaining of what his plans are he makes them look like they are top of the line. He achieves this by making the other candidates, Senator Obama's, look like the antithesis. As we know antithesis is the extreme opposite. While he says he explains what he wants to do he says that Senator Obama wants to do the complete opposite.