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Key Takeaway
Key Takeaway
Pathos is an appeal to emotion, often used to persuade an audience by evoking feelings rather than relying solely on logic.
Advertisements, for example, frequently use pathos—fast food commercials appeal to cravings rather than health concerns. Because we encounter emotional appeals constantly, it’s important to recognize them both as readers and writers.
As a reader, you should be able to analyze how some artifacts turn up the pathos to persuade; as a writer, you need to be careful not to overly rely on pathos as an attempt to sway readers. Remember that while some people may lean heavily on their emotions, others will not be persuaded by strong appeals to pathos, and you will need to consider how to reach them.
People are more likely to engage with an issue when they feel a personal connection to it. Writers and speakers use pathos to create this connection by appealing to shared emotions, values, or beliefs. Even in academic writing, authors may frame issues in ways that resonate with their audience, though they primarily rely on logic and evidence rather than emotion alone.
Evaluating Pathos in Arguments
Evaluating Pathos in Arguments
An author may use an audience’s attitudes, beliefs, or values as a kind of foundation for his or her argument—a layer that the writer knows is already in place at the outset of the argument. When assessing an argument’s use of pathos, consider:
Does it effectively engage the audience’s emotions?
Does it assume the audience shares specific beliefs or attitudes?
Is it balanced with logic and evidence, or does it rely too much on emotion?
Manipulative Appeals to Pathos
Manipulative Appeals to Pathos
A pathos appeal can be a powerful tool when used in moderation, and in balance with the other rhetorical appeals. For example, a speaker might start with a personal story about how a law affects an individual to capture the audience’s attention before presenting logical evidence for or against the law. In this case, pathos enhances the argument without replacing reason.
However, emotional appeals become problematic when they unfairly play upon and manipulate the audience’s feelings and emotions through fallacious, misleading, or excessively emotional appeals. Overuse of such tactics may alienate the audience rather than persuade them.
Key Takeaway: Using Pathos
Key Takeaway: Using Pathos
Even if an appeal to pathos is not manipulative, it should complement rather than replace reason and evidence-based arguments. A strong argument balances pathos, ethos (credibility), and logos (logic). Relying solely on emotion without evidence or credibility weakens an argument and risks losing the audience.
Pathos and Kairos
Pathos and Kairos
Kairos means the right moment or, more simply, timeliness. Appeals to emotion are more likely to be effective if they are also timely. For example, people were more likely to give to charities related to 9/11 soon after the tragedy than they are now. However, donations still rise nearer the actual date of September 11 each year. This is an intersection of kairos and pathos. In other words, people’s emotions are heightened because of a particular time.
Timeliness and emotion might be tied to an annual event, such as sadness or depression on the anniversary of a loved one’s death or pride in the United States on the 4th of July. Other examples could have much larger time frames, such as suspicion and fear of one’s neighbors during the Red Scare in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Or they could be on a much smaller scale, like someone being more generous and cheerful than normal on Friday evenings because the work week is over.
When writing and considering an appeal to pathos, also consider the timeliness. If you were writing a piece on why present-day Americans should fear a widespread viral infectious disease outbreak, it might seem untimely to use the example of smallpox, which was eradicated decades ago, especially since there have been more recent diseases that present greater threats to the limits of modern medicine.
Citations
Citations
CC licensed content, Original
Introduction to Pathos. Provided by: University of Mississippi. License: CC BY: Attribution
CC licensed content, Shared previously
Revision and Adaptation. Provided by: Lumen Learning. License: CC BY: Attribution
How Kairos Works in Appeals to Pathos. Authored by: Guy Krueger. Provided by: University of Mississippi. License: CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
Image of man holding heart. Authored by: Mohamed Hassan. Provided by: Pixabay. Located at: https://pixabay.com/illustrations/man-love-casual-checked-cheerful-3027743/. License: Other. License Terms: https://pixabay.com/service/terms/#license
Public domain content
The Logical Structure of Arguments. Provided by: Radford University. Located at: http://lcubbison.pressbooks.com/chapter/core-201-analyzing-arguments/. Project: Core Curriculum Handbook. License: Public Domain: No Known Copyright
Sarah McLachlan SPCA Commercial. Provided by Hollatronix. Located at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO9d2PpP7tQ License: Other. License Terms: Standard YouTube License
Adapted from
"Pathos" by Lumen Learning. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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