Persuasive Writing Style

The rhetoric of persuasive writing straddles the boundary between the abundance of creativity involved in fiction writing and the slim margin allowed in its expository counterparts. The accuracy of the information cannot be tampered with; the way in which information is presented, on the other hand, can be. A compelling, persuasive writer knows that audience and purpose are going to direct the work in style, structure, and language. Depending on the audience, the author will then choose which persuasive style will do its job most effectively. Ethos, the appeal to credibility, pathos, appeal to emotion, or logos, appeal to logic, each impress upon different audiences. Though written works generally include a combination of the three, an overarching

Writing for a general audience versus that of a college student, a scholar, or a scientist can lead to very different approaches and final products. Compare Bell Hooks’s, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor,” and the collaboration between Max Rose and Frank R. Baumgartner on "Framing The Poor: Media Coverage And U.S. Poverty Policy, 1960-2008,” for instance. They both discuss the misrepresentation of poverty, but the former relies on pathos whereas the latter primarily uses

Though she begins by saying, “[c]ultural critiques rarely talk about the poor,” the middle of her first paragraph transitions smoothly into her own experience of being labeled as “poor” and the negative connotation accompanied with that (Hooks, 432). Specifically, she states, “Wes does not speak of poverty or being poor in his essay. And I can remember having one conversation with him referring to my having come from a “poor” background; he corrected me and stated that my family was “working class”” (Hooks, 432). Out of the fifteen paragraphs she writes on the topic, halfway into the first she is already sharing her experience of poverty and the stigma that surrounds it. From that alone, the reader begins to empathize. Whether poor or not, many others have tiptoed around certain phrases and attempted to maintain “political correctness,” Hooks knows this, and uses it to her advantage. From that point on, the rest of the essay focuses on her personal experience and how it is representative of other people in similar situations. Later in her work, Hooks identifies and connects with the negative view of poverty when she discusses a class she taught on literature of African American, female writers. She mentions that the class is largely populated by black students raised in lower class