Welcome to the vidcasts of the OWL at Purdue,
where we deepen our knowledge of rhetoric, logic, invention, and communication.
Whether you want to know more about the ancient history of rhetoric,
or just get some advice on how to choose the best medium for your message,
the OWL vidcasts are here to guide you.
What role does connection, emotion, feeling, or affect play in our interpretation of writing?
This vidcast explains the importance of emotional choices (or pathos) in written and spoken texts.
Answering the questions: "How does emotion appear in writing?"
How do I convey emotion through my words, and how do I know when my emotions are being manipulated?
In a world attuned to arguments beyond mere logic it is important to consider the role of emotional appeals.
Enjoy the vidcast!
Clean your room!
No!
If you don't clean your room, you're grounded for a month.
I don't care! No!
Please clean your room. You do a really great job and it would mean a lot to me if your room were clean before the party tonight.
Sometimes persuading someone is as easy as choosing the correct emotion with which to speak or write.
This is pathos.
Persuading someone by making an appeal to one's emotions.
Let's talk about Pathos. Pathos is the emotional quality of the speech or text that makes it persuasive to the audience.
Right, and emotion shows up in a lot of different ways in any communication.
It's in the voice of a speaker, whether they sound angry or sad or whatever.
Also, it's in how the speaker feels about the subject matter.
If they are talking about freedom of speech, for example, do they feel sympathy for people whose speech is restricted?
Or do they feel angry that people want to say things that are offensive to them, or what?
These emotional choices, this pathos, can have a lot to do with how influential their message is to an audience.
When I watch TV after a disaster, I always pay attention to how politicians and news networks use emotion.
I try to evaluate how genuine the politician is and how the news network is trying to elicit certain emotions
from viewers like me using various clips or commentary.
That makes sense to me, how watching a speaker in this context of a disaster
can tell you a lot about the emotions in the situation.
But I always think it's harder to talk about this in writing.
I mean, sure, we respond emotionally to things that we read,
but we don't have any face to read the emotion off of.
So how does emotion appear in writing? Or, better, how can my writing make appeals to an audience's emotions?
One thing to do is look at word choice.
This helps me the most. I ask myself what the author is talking about,
what the subject matter is, and then I look at the adjectives he uses to describe it.
If he's talking about a new healthcare plan, for example, and he calls it "misguided" or "overly optimistic"
I can tell that he's aggravated or even angry about the plan's possibility of success.
If I'm trying to find the pathos of a writer
can I just look for a picture of the author and try to see if they're smiling or frowning?
I don't think that would work all the time. But their face might be able to put a face to the author's words.
It could be interesting. Good luck with that.
We may laugh about that, but images can be very powerful tools to use in writing when appealing to the audience's emotions.
For example, thinking back to the example of a person respond to a disaster,
think about how you might respond to what you see.
Images can accompany your writing to prompt a particular response.
I have an issue I want to bring up: Fake pathos.
What do you mean?
Emotion that is faked to persuade an audience.
I think it's great that we want to explore the emotion that speakers put into their speeches,
but if we look at a rhetorical situation, like all the conditions under which a speech is about to be given
or an argument is to be written,
if we look at that rhetorical situation and say "It would be best if the speaker looked sad here",
aren't we kind of saying it's okay for the speaker to lie to the audience?
I don't think we're taking it that far.
What would need to be considered in such a situation is, yes, it might be more persuasive for the speaker
or writer to look or sound sad in a situation, but at what cost?
By this, I mean in looking sad what consequences does the writer or speaker potentially face?
For example, if they were being fake and it was apparent to the audience,
wouldn't that undermine the speaker or writer's credibility and thus undercut his or her ethos?
So I guess every speaker and person studying rhetoric has to determine whether his or her choices are ethical.
The important thing for every speaker and writer to remember
is the consequences, both intended and unintended, of his or her words.
How will they be perceived by the audience and will the words meet the purposes or goals in a rhetorical situation?
And that's really important when thinking about appeals to emotion, or pathos.
Right. And as with ethos, pathos can be difficult to understand
but the best way to really get it is to use it in your speaking and writing
and become comfortable with knowing and using the idea.
Practice makes perfect.