Essay On Logos Of Pathos

The Greek philosopher Aristotle divided persuasive writing into three categories: ethos, logos and pathos (Ramage and Bean 81). Of these categories, only two, pathos and logos pertain to the construct of emotion versus logic. While it may seem in society today that logos is becoming the more prominent of the two, in actuality both logos and pathos are needed to fully understand reality.

In simple terms, pathos refers to a writing or argument that appeals primarily to the reader’s emotion and sense of identity (Ramage and Bean 81). Poetry, novels and other literature are good examples of pathos writing. Logos, on the other hand, appeals to the reader in a logical sense by using reason, facts, figures and data as means of persuasion. Logos writing is most often used in science and economics.

The English language contains a number of constructs. A construct, as defined by Joseph M. Williams in his article “The Phenomenology of Error,” is a set of ideas woven together over time until they seem inevitable. Constructs seem to be the only way of thinking about a problem, when in fact they are not at all inevitable but simply choices in thinking that are constructed to look unavoidable (37). In todays world it seems that logos has become a construct in that people believe the only way to approach reality is through scientific reason and logic. Because of the great advances in science and its authority in modern life, writers today use logos more than pathos. However, while logos writing certainly has value in describing reality and persuading readers, it does not reveal aspects of reality in a way that pathos writing does.

An example of how pathos writing captures aspects of reality that logos cannot is Shakespeare’s Love Sonnet 18. In ...

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...gic help readers understand and relate to the topics of their writing. When writers emphasize logos and exclude, as is often done in the modern world, they fail to convey to the reader aspects of reality that cannot be explained or understood in purely scientific terms.

Shakespeare’s Love Sonnet 18 reveals to the reader an understanding of love that a scientific description of love cannot. In the same way, an astronomy lecture provides important information that is helpful to understanding the science behind stars but does not produce the emotion a writer feels when gazing at the stars on a beautiful night. While these works certainly do a profound job of connecting to the reader, it is the use of pathos that plays an important role in such comprehension. Thus both pathos and logos writings are necessary to help the reader fully understand all aspects of a subject.