Emotional Appeals
Posted by Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, get on up it's blogging time. | Posted in
Is our public discourse too pathetic right now? As I sat and began to collect my thoughts regarding this question and form of rhetoric, I realized I needed to first address the nature of the pathetic argument/appeal itself first. Of the three points of the rhetoric triangle I find the pathetic approach to be the one people are most easily influenced by, but at the same time is the most malicious. When an audience’s emotions are played off of they can really be convinced of anything, whether or not it is logical. I say the pathetic argument is the most malicious in that it can be made and convince without being logical—it manipulates. Over time I have developed this very pessimistic outlook on the pathetic argument because I have fallen victim to it so many times, many of those times without even realizing it.
The most common headlines I see plaguing public discourse these days are usually, “IT’S OVER”, “THE OTHER WOMAN’S STORY”, or “FINALLY GETTING THE HELP THEY NEED” in bold letters. I realize that the reason people pick up and buy these magazines, papers, or tune into the T.V. and listen is because understanding them does not require any prior knowledge or a logical understanding, all you need is to be human and have emotions of any kind. We can easily understand the way in which people feel and establish our own feelings towards something. Anyone can understand the basic story without requiring any knowledge or logic, just an emotional understanding. My opinion is that yes, our public discourse is very pathetic but because it needs to be. Newspapers, tabloids, speeches, any form of discourse need to have pathetic appeal to some nature, otherwise the greater audience may feel excluded and not understand. It is the pathetic nature of these headlines that catches the audience’s attention at first, not necessarily the thought provoking or logical statement. We can all relate to this pathetic headline and understand it because we are human. It’s simple; if a magazine wants to sell and have a greater audience, it needs to have pathetic appeal.
What I do see happening though is discourse relying too heavily on this pathetic appeal in order to sell, and in turn loosing its logical and ethical nature. As I said before the pathetic appeal is malicious in that it is so manipulating, and with less and less logic and ethics in discourse, we are loosing sight of what we should be reading, as well as what’s right and balanced. For the most part our public discourse has fallen victim to a reliance on pathetic appeal and begun to lack consideration for the balance needed between all three points of rhetoric.
I strongly agree that pathetic appeals influence and provoke response more easily than ethos and logos, and also agree that it is the most common to be abused and manipulated by the writer. But those manipulations could be for good or bad intentions. Abstinence ads manipulate pathos, as do drug awareness ads, but those are for good reasons, whereas manipulations such as false consequences and hyper-exaggerations can be harmful.
I disagree that public discourse needs to be pathetic however, because many emotional understandings could also be achieved through logical explanations. I believe the reliance on pathetic appeals increased because of growing impatience of the public and the common practice of taking information out of context. For example, a picture of a grieving woman immediately provokes sympathy but you may not know until you read the article why she is grieving, which could be for her husband who lost a battle with brain cancer or for a mass murderer who was executed. The picture could evoke the same emotion in either case, but could mislead the public. This occurrence is often taken advantage of and misused by the media and sometimes politicians. This could also be used with text, especially headlines from newspapers that manipulate words.
Sorry, that wasn't quite all of it.
These misconceptions have changed how the public functions with media. Issues construed in certain ways changes the way the public responds to an issue, which can create even larger issues when responses are out of proportion to the issue.
Although pathetic appeals are more universally understood, they do sometimes fail to acknowledge and present the issue in its correct time and place for the correct audience.