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The Three Appeals

In our textbook chapter for this module, the focus is on making an emotional appeal to your audience. But first, I want to take a step back and briefly review the three appeals that writers use to develop a persuasive argument: logos, ethos, and pathos. Another way to think of these is the head, character, and heart appeals. The first, logos, is the logical argument. It appeals to our thinking brains. Logos offers us facts, strong arguments, solid analysis. The second, ethos, uses the author's expertise and trustworthiness to develop a connection with the audience. This appeal can work both ways; just as the audience wants to see that the author is credible, the author may try to appeal to the good character of the audience to win them over. And then we come to pathos, which is the appeal to our hearts and our emotions. We're used to have our heart strings tugged when we watch television commercials. But is an emotional appeal appropriate in an academic essay?

My answer is a qualified yes. Academic arguments are not supposed to be manipulative, and we need to take care not to lean too heavily on emotion or fill our essays with exclamation points. However, the people who make up the academic world are just that -- people. They have personal lives, people and issues they care about. So in academia, rather than ignore the emotional side of an argument, we allow strong feelings, but we avoid strong outbursts. In other words, if you want your audience to be outraged by an issue that makes you feel outraged, don't scream, accuse, or sensationalize in your essay. Instead, expose the issue, share the facts, describe the impact, and help your reader get to the same emotional place where you sit.

Aristotle gets the credit for first describing the three appeals in his work On Rhetoric over two thousand years ago. That's why we call them the Aristotelian appeals to this day. Here is a quick video from TedED if you're interested in learning a bit more: