Pathos continued...

In my last blog entry, I wrote about the use of pathos in argumentative writing. As a refresher, I will mention once again that pathos refer to a rhetor appealing to the emotion of the audience in order to persuade and make his/her argument stronger. In that entry, I mentioned a commercial that appeals to the emotions of the viewers and how it is effective in its persuasion. On a larger scale, I was reading the news today and I came across an example of rhetors using pathos to further persuade the American population of voters to vote for Obama.

This article explains why Obama will be taking a break from his campaign trail for the weekend to "visit his ailing grandmother" http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/10/20/campaign.wrap/index.html#cnnSTCText. I think this article serves two purposes. First, it simply informs the audience why Obama had to suddenly cancel his campaigning in multiple cities, and secondly, it appeals to the emotions of the audience. Many people have dealt with the grief of losing a loved one or with the sickness of a loved one, and by explaining that Obama will be doing just that, an emotion is sparked within the members of the audience because they can relate.

In my textbook, it states, "Emotional responses help people to change their minds. When a person experiences an emotion such as anger, pity, or fear, she enters a new state of mind in which she sees things differently" (Crowley, 251). By giving the story of how much his grandmother means to him, and therefore, he must visit her in her sickness, Obama's campaign is eliciting an emotional response within the audience that might in fact persuade people to believe that Obama is a caring man, a family man, a loving man. I'm not saying that he is not any of these things; instead, I am saying that this is the rhetorical practice of using pathos and appealing to the emotions of the audience for further persuasion toward an argument (in this case trying to persuade people to vote for Obama because he is a good guy).

This is an interesting technique, but I find in looking at various articles, pathos are used quite often and appear to be quite effective in rhetoric.