Homework for Friday

Pathos

Persuasion from pathos involves engaging the readers' or listeners' emotions. Appealing to pathos does not mean that you just emote or "go off' through your writing. Not that simple. Appealing to pathos in your readers (or listeners), you establish in them a state of reception for your ideas. You can attempt to fill your readers with pity for somebody or contempt for some wrong. You can create a sense of envy or of indignation. Naturally, in order for you to establish at will any desired state of emotion in your readers, you will have to know everything you can about psychology. Maybe that's why Aristotle wrote so many books about the philosophy of human nature. In the Rhetoric itself, Aristotle advises writers at length how to create anger toward some ideal circumstance and how also to create a sense of calm in readers. He also explains principles of friendship and enmity as shared pleasure and pain. He discusses how to create in readers a sense of fear and shame and shamelessness and kindness and unkindness and pity and indignation and envy and indignation and emulation. Then he starts all over and shows how to create such feelings toward ideas in various types of human character' of "people" of virtue and vice; those of youth, prime of life, and old age; and those of good fortune and those of bad fortune." Aristotle warns us, however: knowing (as a good willed writer) how to get your readers to receive your ideas by making readers "pleased and friendly" or "pained and hostile" is one thing; playing on readers' emotions in ways that make them mindless of concepts and consequences can corrupt the judgment of both individuals and the community.

Assignment:
Consider what you wrote about for your essay on The Giving Tree. You tried to make the reader feel a certain emotion in order to get the reader to agree with your interpretation.

On Friday, you will either revise this essay, or perhaps start a new essay attempting to make an emotional appeal. What I would now like you to consider, as a way to even more successfully get the reader to feel what you want them to, is the following:

1. What people are when they are __angry (or any other emotion)_.

2. What kinds of people are making them feel __angry (or any other emotion)_.

3. What circumstances are making them feel _angry (or any other emotion)_.

Answer all three for homework, pertaining to whatever emotion you chose to incorporate in your Giving Tree essay.