Emotional Appeal to help AIDS in India

I read Mike's analysis of Melinda French Gates's article titled "AIDS and India". I feel like her use of emotional appeal as a means of persuasion deserves further analysis.

Melinda is writing to the people in the Pacific Northwest who subscribe to the Seattle Times. Her goal is to motivate the readers to help out the AIDS situation in Africa through donations, not necessarily to her own foundation. She wants the people to be helped and if she’s not the one doing it she’s fine with that as long as someone else is. The readers know very little, if anything, at all about AIDS in India. It isn’t affecting their everyday lives because they live in Seattle or it’s surrounding areas. Much like the commercials on TV that ask for money to feed starving children in Africa, she has to make the reader feel sorry for the victim and convince him that it will really be used to help the people and will be effective.

The Pacific Northwest is a very liberal region. Seattle is the only major US city to perform a city-wide strike through labor unions in order to receive higher wages. They are more accepting and protective of gay and lesbian rights than the rest of the country. Oregon and Washington were the first two states to allow for assisted suicide, where someone in bad health is given the tools to kill themselves, in the United States, the only other being Montana. In the past, it was known as a hotspot for socialists. Perhaps even more pertinent to this subject is that Washington passed a law in 2007 that made comprehensive sex education, one that includes the use of condoms and other contraceptives, mandatory in any school that wishes to teach sex education. This shows that a majority of the people are in support of teaching about condom use in order to prevent STDs. In other areas where the religious right has a larger influence they might be more interested in how to teach the Indian people fidelity in marriage and abstinence.

Melinda isn’t writing to everyone in the Pacific Northwest however, she is writing specifically to subscribers of the Seattle Times. The demographics for the Seattle Times show us that approximately sixty-eight percent of the population has an income of fifty thousand dollars or more and nearly fifty percent make seventy five thousand or more. The Seattle Times reaches at least seventy percent of both groups. Seventy-three percent of the population owns their own home and the Times reaches over seventy percent of those people as well. This information suggests that a large portion of these readers are well established and have the capacity to donate when they feel inclined to do so. Melinda’s foundation supports their ideology on the use of condoms to prevent STDs and they have money to contribute, she just needs to make them feel like they should help and that their money will help. Melinda uses emotional appeal through positive, successful examples as a means to create sympathy for those affected and to illustrate that the program is working.

Diction is her first technique to create sympathy in her reader. Phrases such as "crippling poverty," "AIDS catastrophe," "the epidemic," and “disaster” appear in the first paragraphs. Her use of these words paint a dismal landscape where AIDS infects men, women, and children from North to South and East to West. Often times these words seem almost unavoidable. Nobody can escape an epidemic. Everyone is damaged in a catastrophe. Being crippled by poverty makes it seem insurmountable. This word choice becomes more effective when she cites projections that "as many as 20 million Indians could be infected by the end of the decade--that's more than twice the population of New York City." The reader is now rather sickened and softened so that he wants to learn more.

Just as important are the words she doesn’t use. 4 million and 20 million are pretty big numbers until the reader realizes that if India’s population is rounded DOWN to 1 billion, 4 million and 20 million make up a meager .4 and 2 percent of the whole population respectively. Doesn’t sound quite like an unavoidable epidemic when you put it in those terms but the reader was too distracted by thoughts of all of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, and Philadelphia dying of AIDS to realize it.

Melinda then capitalizes on the created sympathy by shifting the argument; in the fifth paragraph she says, “A range of HIV-prevention measure are working in India.” The situation is dire, but not unconquerable. She follows with a story about a “sex worker” (prostitute) and how these measures have helped her. Mike already discussed how her choice of the word “sex worker” instead of “prostitute” “appeals to the reader’s ability to pity.” Visualizing a person fighting AIDS in India makes the situation more real and immediate to the reader. Nobody wants to throw their money or efforts into a hopeless black hole where the people won’t help themselves. The progress made by these individuals assures the possible donator his money will be used effectively to help people who are trying to do it themselves but don’t have the means.

She uses another concrete example, this time about truck drivers who have been educated about condoms. This example does the same as its predecessor, allowing the reader to see that his money will be put to good use. This time however she focuses on the fact that these people knew nothing about AIDS before the people got there. Many of the readers instantly will feel sorry for the wives of these truck drivers and the sympathy grows even more after thinking that it if the husband wasn’t educated about AIDS he could contract it and then pass it on to the family. This creates the need for a foundation like hers. The reader sees that there is more work to do in order to reach all of India so his money is needed just as much as it will be effective in educating those men. These examples allow the people to feel good because they can see that progress is being made and a lot of times people want to feel good and shy away from bigger problems they may face.

The next endeavor at creating emotional appeal, “a woman whose husband dies of AIDS is often blamed for his death, and thrown out of the home with her children” illustrated again how dire the situation can be at times but after reading this the reader may question, “How can a woman be thrown out of her own home if her husband is dead?” because he probably doesn’t know that extended families live together in India. An explanation of the social background would have been helpful. Melinda continually uses sympathetic stories to create sympathy in the reader.

She closes her article with the donation and call to action pitch. In her pitch she says, “rich countries” in an off-handish way that reminds the reader that they may not have everything they want but they have a lot more than anybody else. The most effective portion of her pitch was that she provided other organizations that could be donated to, which shows that she’s more interested in helping the people rather than getting more money for donations. She doesn’t care if she is the one helping or if it is somebody else. She concludes by bringing back her concrete example of the sex worker “women like Gita really shall overcome” which is her last attempt to make the reader feel connected to these people and that they can help them. Her use of the phrase “shall overcome” is an allusion to the song “We Shall Overcome” which was a very popular song associated with the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights movement was very successful and now she is throwing her cause along with that one, something positive, something that will work. This was her last move to use emotion to sway her audience into action, all the while assuring that their efforts would be effective