What you’ll learn to do: recognize and evaluate appeals to pathos

People may be uninterested in an issue unless they can find a personal connection to it, so a communicator may try to connect to the audience by evoking emotions or by suggesting that author and audience share attitudes, beliefs, and values—in other words, by making an appeal to pathos.

Even in formal writing, such as academic books or journals, an author often will try to present an issue in such a way as to connect to the feelings or attitudes of his or her audience (however, academic writing moves beyond reliance solely on appeals to pathos). When you evaluate pathos, you are asking whether a piece of writing, a speech, etc. arouses the audience’s interest and sympathy. You are looking for the elements that might cause the audience to feel (or not feel) an emotional connection to the content.

Pathos is an appeal to someone’s emotions. We are exposed to appeals to emotions on an almost constant basis, so it is easy to become numb to such tactics; however, it is important to be aware of such rhetorical strategies both as readers and writers. 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.