4 questions to men who have not enlisted
1
2
3
4
5
Library of Congress · LC-USZC4-12691 (color film copy transparency) · Public domain · Catalog record
The pins
Context
For discussion
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1
Loaded question Question 1 "Are you really satisfied with what you are doing to-day?" The word "really" tells the reader what the honest answer is before he has given it.
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2
Bandwagon Question 2 "Other men" are already in uniform, and the reader is asked how it feels to walk past them. The pressure is from the crowd, not from the enemy.
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3
Appeal to fear Question 3 The same fear as "Daddy, what did YOU do": not of death but of being asked, years later, where you were.
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4
False dilemma Question 4 "If every man stayed at home." Nobody proposed that every man stay at home; the question replaces the reader's own case with an absurd one and asks him to answer for it.
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5
Appeal to authority Your King and Country need you After four questions the sheet stops asking. The King and the country are invoked to close the argument that the questions were pretending to hold open.
A text-only recruiting sheet issued in Toronto in 1915 by the Central Recruiting Committee of Canada's No. 2 Military District, adapted from a British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee original. It asks four questions in turn, each with its answer built in, and ends with "Enlist to-day." The question format was a favorite on both sides of the Atlantic: it reads as reasoning while leaving the reader no room to reason back.
- Try answering each of the four questions honestly. Is any answer other than enlisting possible?
- What does the plain typographic layout do that a picture would not?
- Who is the "you" in the questions, and who is excluded?
See also
Same era, or the same techniques.
