Writing for the Public

Pathetic Appeals have to do with the ways a writer incites or arouses emotions in the audience.

When you are composing emotional appeals, you want to think about the emotional state of the audience at that moment, and the ways the rhetor is attempting to build on or shift that emotional state.

Emotional intensity alters in accordance with the special and temporal proximity of the people or situations that arouse them.

Emotional intensity also shifts depending on who else shares in the emotional event.

·      Think about how TV helps and hinders this spatial proximity: What was our proximity to 9-11 and Katrina as opposed to earthquakes in China.

The question becomes how does the rhetor create emotional/pathetic appeals? 

1. The rhetor must study the audience, thinking about their past, their values, and their beliefs.

2. The rhetor must assess the audience’s attitude toward the issue: hostile, indifferent, accepting. When audiences are indifferent, they are the most difficult to move.

3. The rhetor might also consider how emotionally attached the audience is to the issue and how that audience associates that issue with their identities.

4. When the rhetor composes an emotional appeal it must be directly related to the audience’s level of interest.

Kinds of Emotional Appeals

Enargeia: a figure in which the rhetor pictures events so vividly that they actually seem to be taking place before the audience. It is a vivid depiction of events or a moment.

Ex. You are walking down a cobbled street in an old village during the fall. A few leaves are falling from the trees, while others hold on to their branches in brilliant colors of gold and red.

Honorific Language: words used by the rhetor that honors an issue; that place the issue in a positive light.

Ex. The beloved principle cast a knowing smile onto his adoring students as they awaited his  unwelcome retirement speech.

Pejorative Language: words used by a rhetor that diminish an issue; that place the issue in a negative light.

Ex. The hated principle grimaced at his cowering students as he distributed undeserved detention slips.

Anecdotes: Enable the writer to tell a story that might arouse emotion in the reader

Ex. To help a struggling student with his speech, the teacher stayed after class three days a week for five weeks, working with the students revised essays, cheering him on, and helping him improve.

Simile/Metaphor:

Ex. My boss is like Ghandi.

Ex. My boss is Hitler.

References

Ex. We cannot forget September 11, 2001. We must defend our country.

Examples

Sarah visits her grandmother every afternoon, preparing her dinner and taking care of household chores her grandmother can no longer do. After this visit, Sarah often checks in on her grandmother’s neighbors just to make sure they don’t need anything.