From Summer, 2009, Burger King’s highly suggestive ad ‘The Big Seven Incher.’ This was collected by one of my students at McDaniel in the fall of 2010.

Satire, like visual images and works of fiction, cannot be an argument on its own. But it can be used as a powerful persuasive act of speech.  Doing do requires, however, that the speaker and audience understand the satire.

Here are a few examples of facebook users misunderstanding the satirical newspaper The Onion, from ‘Literally unbelievable‘, a tumblr blog dedicated to tracking these misunderstandings.  At this time, the most popular misunderstood stories are about Oprah and Prince William, somewhat not surprisingly.  But I’ve chosen to feature a handful of stories about the mythical Kansas ‘abortionplex’, because so much of American rhetoric and politics revolves around the flashpoint of abortion, it should be easy to tie in to a variety of classes:

A Travelocity ad from the ‘roaming gnome’ series. Not an argument, but a good example of non-argumentative persuasion.