An appeal to advantage is a rhetorical device in which the speaker encourages his or her audience to perform some action by representing that action as being in the audience's best interest.
An appeal to advantage can also be a request from someone in a position of power to someone who is in a socially subordinate position; the request is specifically for the subordinate to perform an act contrary to the subordinate's wishes, such that the subordinate is forced to commit the act in order to satisfy a more significant need. The appeal is specifically most expedient or advantageous to the person in power, but is also presented as forwarding the subordinate's interests in some significant way.
Famous quotes containing the words appeal to, advantage and/or appeal:
“You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
“The advantage of love at first sight is that it delays a second sight.”
—Natalie Clifford Barney (1876–1972)
“I appeal now to the convictions of the communicants, and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)