One important ability, for native English speakers and ESL students alike, is identifying Emotive Language within a text. The reason for this is simple; Emotive Language is often used in speeches and persuasive essays in the absence of logical reasoning. Without facts and statistics, writers often use Emotive Language to express their opinions.
What is Emotive Language?
Emotive Language are words or phrases that are used to provoke an emotional response in the reader. Certain words or phrases can can be used to make the reader angry, sad, frustrated, or happy. Words like "disastrous", "wonderful", "dangerous", and "beautiful", can be used in sentences to inspire a variety of feelings in the reader.
The Danger in using Emotive Language in Writing:
Using Emotive Language is usually inappropriate in academic writing, particularly if it is being used in the place of a logical argument. Emotive Language only persuades a reader to think a certain way, but does not prove anything to be true or false. In fact, Emotive Language can actually mislead a reader to believe something that is entirely untrue.
Look at the example below. This is an example of how Emotive Language can be used to persuade a reader to think a certain way without providing any detailed information. The sample text, written on illegal immigration, contains no facts or statistics.
Illegal Immigration
For many years now, illegal immigrants have come to this country without the permission of our government. The number of people who now reside in our beautiful country without the proper documentation could be in the millions. How long are we going to allow this to happen? If we do not take immediate action against the never-ending flow of illegal immigrants entering our country every day, our dear country will have a very sad future.
The reason I say this is that illegal immigration affects all aspects of our daily lives. Illegal immigrants take jobs away from citizens who would otherwise be working at them. Businesses like to hire illegal immigrants because they always accept less money for their work than people who are either citizens of this country, or those who have come to this country legally. How will our children be able to find good-paying jobs when so many illegal immigrants are invading our towns and cities and accepting low wages for their work? The answer is, they won’t! Our children will be forced to work for a very low salary, if they can even find jobs at all, because of how illegal immigration is affecting our economy.
Another reason why illegal immigration is destroying our way of life is how it is affecting our public schools. Since our government cannot deny free education to anyone based on immigration status, the children of illegal immigrants are overcrowding our schools. This situation will have a very negative affect on the quality of education in our nation’s public schools. How will our poor teachers be able to provide a good education for our children when they must constantly deal with students who cannot even speak the language? This is very sad situation indeed. Our once proud public schools are being torn apart!
Finally, I must express my disgust at how illegal immigration is affecting the health care system in our country. The real problem is that none of the illegal immigrants who go to the hospital have health insurance. Since they cannot pay for their health care, they expect honest, hard-working taxpayers to pay their hospital bills for them. This is an outrage!
I hope that this speech has opened your eyes to the terrible situation we have in our country. As proud citizens of a noble country, we must do something about this at once! The only solution is to join together in an effort to stop illegal immigration once and for all. We must tell our government how we really feel about this serious problem. Think of your families, your children. They are relying on us to stop this threat from destroying our country and ruining our way of life.
1) How does the author of this speech want us to feel about illegal immigration?
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2) What problems concerning illegal immigration does the author mention?
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3) Does the author provide facts and statistics to support his beliefs?
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4) Underline the parts of the speech above that contain “Emotive Language”.
5) What does the author of this speech want us to do?
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