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why use pathos in writing
Pathos and examples
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Torture is a loaded word. It conjures images in a readers' mind of any number of horrors, physical and mental. Many writers rely on this reaction and use pathos in their articles to illicit a strong response in their audience. Pathos is an emotional appeal used to gain sympathy and trust from the audience and works for people of all intellectual levels. It often casts the author or characters in a story as an Everyman, easy to identify, and therefore see eye to eye, with. In my opinion, the more an author is able to create a personal connection to torture, the stronger their argument becomes. Strong emotions create a more appealing argument for an everyday audience.
Michael Levin's “The Case for Torture” uses a few moments of pathos to convince the audience of the potential benefit of torture. He poses several scenarios of terrorists planning attacks on large numbers of innocent people and then asks, “If the only way to save those lives is to subject the terrorist to the most excruciating possible pain, what grounds can there be for not doing so?” Even if you don't agree with him, he urges the reader to “face the question with an open mind.” By doing this, Levin uses pathos as well as ethos to present himself as a nice guy who's not unreasonable. Though his argument is different from Levin's, Andrew Sullivan tries a similar approach in his article, “Bush's torturers follow where the Nazis led”. The article demonstrates a clear use of pathos from the beginning. Sullivan begins with some personal information about himself, showing that is is one of the regular people. His imagery is subtle but powerful. By implying that the government's behavior is in some way akin to the Nazis, he conjures up a powerful imagine in the readers min...
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Ortiz, Sister Dianna. "Mr. President, stop the torture!" US Catholic Magazine Online. July 2004. 26 Sept 2008 news_iv_ctrl=1341&abbr=usc_&JServSessionIdr001=anotsvvjc1.app45a> Ortiz, Sister Dianna. "Speak Truth to Power Defender – Interview with Dianna Ortiz." Speak Truth to Power. 26 Sept 2008.
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Sullivan, Andrew. "Bush's torturers follow where the Nazis led." Times Online. 7 October 2007. 23 Sept 2008 andrew_sullivan/article2602564.ece> Porter, Henry. "America's Dirty Torture Secret." The Guardian. 10 Sept 2003. 1 Oct 2008 .
Ehrenreich gets a job as a waitress and one of the first times she uses pathos is when she explains what she had to go through to get the job. " if you want to stack Cheerios boxes or vacuum hotel rooms in chemically fascist America, you have to be willing to squat down and pee in front of a health worker(who has no doubt had to do the same thing herself.)(Barbara Ehrenreich, 14) In this appeal Ehrenreich is stating that all lo...
Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, a senior writer at U.S. News and World, published her article, "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism," in 2004. She uses the article to briefly overview the scandal as a whole before diving into what can trigger sadistic behavior. The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal took place in 2004, wherein American troops humiliated and tortured Iraqi detainees (Szegedy-Maszak 75). The main objective of Szegedy-Maszak’s article is to investigate the causation behind sadistic behavior, exclusively in the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. She effectively does so by gathering information and research from professional psychologists and professors of psychology, specifically Herbert Kelman and Robert Okin (Szegedy-Maszak 76). She finds
Every civilized society makes laws that protect its values, and the society expects every single citizen to obey these laws. Whenever a citizen of a certain society breaks one of these laws, the rulers of the society dish out punishments they dim fit for the kind of crime committed. With this kind of justice system in place, criminals are either locked up in prison cells, whipped, or exiled from the society. In the essay, “Bring Back Flogging”, columnist Jeff Jacoby argues that flogging is much more superior to imprisonment and should be brought back as a method of punishing crime offenders like the Puritans did in the past. He is convinced that the shame associated with flogging would prevent offenders from going into crime professionally. Jacoby believes that whipping criminals has more educational value compared to locking them up in cells and that it saves a lot of money. Throughout the essay Jacoby attempts to build ethos even though it fell apart due to misconceptions. He relied mostly on the use of pathos by appealing to his reader’s emotions and using this as a base ground for his logos.
Car commercials are made to convince the audience to buy their car because it is the best, or so they think. They do this by using different modes of persuasion; two examples of this are ethos and pathos. Ethos and pathos are methods used to persuade the audience into believing something that you want them to. Ethos is the ethical appeal that focuses on the author's credibility. It makes sure the audience believes something that an expert or character is saying about the product. Pathos, on the other side, is the emotional appeal that focuses on attracting the audience’s emotions. It makes the audience feel a certain way after watching the commercial. One example of ethos car commercial is “2015 Kia K900 Luxury Car – LeBron James Commercial – NBA Partnership – Valet” and “2014 Subaru Forester TV Commercial Daughter” car commercial for pathos.
Fish uses the appeal of pathos many times throughout his argument. In “A Key Distinction” Fish discusses the history behind racism when he writes, “... to limit access to educational institutions, to prevent entry into the economy except at the lowest most menial levels…” Here he is using pathos by sympathetically expressing the setbacks people of race and ethnicity had to deal with throughout their life. Later on in “A Key Distinction” he sets an example argument by
In novels with delicate topics, such as the Holocaust, small glimpse of humor help detach the reader
In “The Perils of Indifference” Elie Wiesel uses several techniques to get his point across. Three of them in the speech are Ethos, Repetition, and Pathos. He uses a combination of the three elements throughout the paragraphs of his speech to attract the readers. The combination of these elements help draw the reader’s emotions and interest towards his subject. He focuses on word choice that would pertain to his audience’s level of vocabulary.
In “The Case For Torture” an article written by Michael Levin, he attempts to justify the use of torture as a means of saving lives. Throughout the article, Levin gives the reader many hypothetical examples in which he believes torture is the only method of resolution. Though I agree with Levin, to some degree, his essay relies heavily on the fears of people and exploits them to convince people into thinking pain is the only way. In certain aspects, I could agree entirely with Levin, but when one reads deeper into the article, many fallacies become apparent. These fallacies detract from the articles academic standing and arguably renders the entire case futile. Levin’s strategy of playing with the fears of people is genius, but, with more creditable details of the issue the article would have sustained the scrutiny of more educated individuals. The addition of more concrete information, would have given people something to cling to, inherently improving the articles creditability.
In the speech “Keep Memory Alive” by Elie Wiesel, the author is trying to inform his audience about the Holocaust while also trying to persuade them to keep fighting in keeping the memory alive. He does this by employing the rhetorical features of pathos, repetition and ethos throughout his speech in order to effectively persuade and inform.
The quote “Enrique cannot see blood, but he senses it everywhere. It runs in gooey dribbles down his face and out his ears and nose. It tastes bitter in his mouth….The sun is high and hot. Enriques left eyelid won't open. His battered knees don't want to bend” is a great example of how the author gets our attention by appealing to our emotions (Nazario 61). In Sonia Nazarios book “Enrique's Journey,” the author does a great job of using all three of the Aristotelian appeals. The one that stands out the most is pathos, the appeal to emotion. In this novel, the author uses pathos to better the story; and try to change the minds of Americans about immigration by using many different techniques such as
In 1741, Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher of that time, had one thing on his mind: to convert sinners, on the road to hell, to salvation. It just so happened to be, that his way of doing that was to preach the reality to them and scare them to the point of conversion. Sermons of this time were preached to persuade people to be converted and to me it seemed that Edwards just had a special way of doing it. Just as people are being influenced by rhetoric appeals today Edwards used the same method on his congregation. In “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Jonathan Edwards positively affected his readers using pathos, logos, and ethos, while trying to convince the unconverted members of his sermon to be born again.
In the article, “The Torture Myth,” Anne Applebaum explores the controversial topic of torture practices, focused primarily in The United States. The article was published on January 12, 2005, inspired by the dramatic increase of tensions between terrorist organizations and The United States. Applebaum explores three equality titillating concepts within the article. Applebaum's questions the actual effectiveness of using torture as a means of obtaining valuable information in urgent times. Applebaum explores the ways in which she feels that the United States’ torture policy ultimately produces negative effects upon the country. Applebaum's final question is if torture is not optimally successful, why so much of society believes it works efficiently.
Strength of Argument: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Bell Hooks’s essay, "Keeping Close to Home", uses three important components of argument (ethos, pathos, and logos) to support her claim. Hooks develops her essay by establishing credibility with her audience, appealing to the reader’s logic, and stirring their emotions. She questions the role a university should play in the life of a nation, claiming that higher education should not tear a student away from his roots, but help him to build an education upon his background. Bell Hooks gains the trust and credibility of readers through knowledge of the topic at hand, establishing common ground with the audience, and demonstrating fairness.
We have been taught that we should always follow our priorities, whether it is dealing with jobs, families, education, or faith. Ethical egoism teaches us that if our interests are any one these or something else, we should put it first because these are our values. But how far should we go in protecting our values? Is there a limit of how they should be protected? Am I doing what’s best for my priorities or for me? Although we should protect our values, there needs to be a limit and a focus of how I should protect my values with the best intentions. The film, Prisoners, presents this moral dilemma of torture through the characters’ decisions and emotions.
Pathos means to persuade an audience by appealing to their emotions. For instance, “If America meets it correctly, then, despite hosts of dangers and difficulties, we can look forward and move forward to a future worthy of men, with peace in our hearts. If we dodge the issue, we shall flounder for ten or 20 or 30 bitter years in a chartless and meaningless series of disasters.” This pathos makes the readers feel nervous, and they want to figure out whether America can avoid waste the best period. Therefore, the readers will focus on how they can solve the problem, and they cannot wait to read the following words. Another instance is that the paragraph “If there's one place we Americans did not want to be, it was in the war. We didn't want much to be in any kind of war but, if there was one kind of war we most of all didn't want to be in, it was a European war. Yet, we're in a war, as vicious and bad a war as ever struck this planet, and, along with being worldwide, a European war.” The author stand with the reader: they do not want to be involved in the war, and they want to escape from it. Then he said that “We say we don't want to be in the war. We also say we want England to win. We want Hitler stopped - more than we want to stay out of the war. So, at the moment, we're in.”, which shows the consideration of getting out of the war, and it makes the readers acknowledge that the America was