Rhetorical Devices In Ted Talk

Speaker, Jia Jiang, in his TED Talk, “What I Learned from 100 Days of Rejection,” speaks about the overwhelming fear of rejection and offers a solution to overcoming it. He proposes that if you refrain from running away and instead decide to stick around and explain your situation, you may be able to overcome the rejection and possibly change the outcome of the situation. The speaker effectively appeals to his audience through the use of rhetoric and rhetorical devices.

Jiang establishes credibility from the start, using a personal anecdote to share a story of when he was harshly rejected as a kid. Additionally, he experienced even more rejection in his line of work as an entrepreneur, furthering the appeal to his ethos. As he kept getting rejected in numerous ways, he always ran away from the rejection, never to be looked back at. After a while, he finally realized that he wanted to overcome his fear of being rejected so he could be better for his team, as he also wanted to build his own company.
He explains the process of “Rejection Therapy” to help him get over his fear of rejection, which is used to compare his journey to a therapeutic session to get better from a mental illness. The way he did this was that he was going to go out 100 days in a row to ask crazy things and get rejected. After going through the first three days, he realized that the outcome does not always have to end in rejection. Continuing his journey, Jiang decided that he would instead stay after being rejected to see if he could change the outcome of the situation, referring to that as his “playground,” comparing his new experiment with the playfulness and curiosity of a child to explain how he was having fun with the experiment. The audience took this well as everyone was a child once and had the experience of doing something fun for the sake of