Critical Rhetorical Analysis - Essay Example

In Ted Talks: Making Global Labor Fair, Auret Van Heerden, uses several technical devices to make his speech. He uses rhetorical questions like “How come the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed this to happen? How did the Chinese State Agency for Food and Drugs allow this to happen?” (Auret, 2010). He uses rhetorical questions to make the audience aware of the government’s responsibility, as well as its failure in protecting worker’s human rights. The rhetorical questions he poses, he answers.

He uses this persuasive technique to both inform and rouse the interest of the audience. Auret also uses contrast to pass his message across. For example, “We all love chocolate. We buy it for our kids. Eighty percent of the cocoa comes from Cote dIvoire and Ghana, and its harvested by children. Cote dIvoire, we have a huge problem of child slaves. Children have been trafficked from other conflict zones to come and work on the coffee plantations.” He uses the rhetoric strategy to draw a sharp contrast between the severities of the abuse of children’s human rights of those used as slaves to harvest the cocoa used to make the chocolate.

The technique may fail due to its inclination to evoke emotions of the listeners. It is, however, a good strategy to show the difference between the children harvesting in the cocoa farms and those consuming the chocolate. The employment of these two rhetorical devices is valid because they are used in appropriate instances. For example, before Auret asked the question as to why the governments in America and China do not stand to protect the rights of its citizens, he had already laid out facts that show a violation of human rights.

He used the technique to bring to light the inadequacies of the state laws in the international policy fields. He also used the technique to introduce his new argument about how the multinationals can be the solutions to the problem by employing a