#Persuasion

Appeals to Emotion

Pathos, or the appeal to emotion, is one of the Modes of Persuasion that means to persuade an audience by purposely evoking certain emotions to make them feel the way the author wants them to feel. Authors make deliberate word choices, use meaningful language, and use examples and stories that evoke emotion. Authors can desire a range of emotional responses, including sympathy, anger, frustration, or even amusement.

Feature	Meaning
Anaphora	The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses.
Attacks and praise	Affirming one idea or person while criticising their opposite.
Colloquialism	Using vernacular or even slang language, often to appeal to the ‘everyday’ person.
Cumulation	Sometimes called the ‘rule of three’, cumulation refers to the accumulation (heaping up) of descriptive words or phrases.
Emotive Language	Language that is highly emotional, designed to provoke an emotional response in the audience
Emphasis	The devices of repetition, alliteration or Cumulation, used to add emphasiss to or reinforce an idea.
Generalisation	A statement that is expanded from a specific situation to a broad one, suggesting that what is true for some is true for most or all.
Hyperbole	A deliberate exaggeration not meant to be taken literally.
Inclusive language	Language such as personal pronouns (e.g. ‘we’, ‘us’, ‘our’), that makes the audience feel included in the writer’s argument.
Litotes	An ironic understatement in which an idea is expressed as not being its oppositite (e.g. ‘not at all bad’)
Repetition	The use of a key phrase, idea or image at multiple points.
Rhetorical question	A question that is posed not ti elicit an answer but to enocourage that audience to think