Ethos Pathos Logos Essay: Tips for Refined Writings

When students write essays, they mostly focus on such aspects as logical structure, compliance with length requirements, topic relevance and a sufficient number of materials to base their argument on. They also pay a lot of attention to checking their paper for mistakes, thus ending up concentrating lesson the content. The least of their concerns at this point is the presence of ethos, pathos, logos in an essay. It is, therefore, quite likely that many of you will become familiar with these concepts only after reading this article. Knowing how to use ethos-pathos-logos in an essay can dramatically increase your chances of persuading your audience.

According to Aristotle, the terms "ethos," "pathos," and "logos" play the major role in rhetoric. If you write the ethos pathos logos essay (persuasive, in particular) should be well-grounded, convincing and interesting to your reader. Stay tuned and learn more about these important points that can help you make your academic assignment perfect and improve your writing and rhetorical skills.

How to include ethos pathos and logos in an essay: Guidelines and Examples

If you are wondering how to include ethos pathos and logos in an essay appropriately, the first thing you need to do is to understand what these three concepts are all about. Though not very popular among students, the ethos-pathos-logos can help you improve the quality of your essay and even earn you a higher grade. According to Aristotle, there are three major groups of possible arguments, each of which represents a specific principle: mental, moral, or sensual. The use of ethos pathos and logos in essay implies using three main approaches to resultative persuasion, which will leave nobody indifferent or skeptical. Now, let’s study each concept in detail and learn how to write an essay using ethos pathos and logos.

Ethos in an essay

Ethos in writing is commonly referred to as conditions that the recipient of speech offers to the speaker (author). Ethos is an authority of the speaker or writer. In order to attract your audience’s attention to a particular topic, the person who states their ideas (the student in our case) should establish themselves as someone who can be trusted, or someone who has extensive experience in dealing with the topic. That is also called ethics. How to use ethos in an essay? Focus on your reader or listener. Depending on the purpose of your paper and the target audience, the notion of ethos can imply using different stylistic devices. Here are some tips for applying ethos in your writing:

Emphasize your experience; mention your education or real-life example
Win the trust of your audience; be open and honest in your narration
Do some research to understand which statements will be relevant in the context of your topic

For example, if we are talking about football, the speaker should be a famous football player, who later became a coach. Therefore, he knows what he is talking about. Maybe he spent a lot of time analyzing football matches and making predictions that almost always came true. What is more important is the charm of the speaker, which is another peculiarity of ethos in an essay.

Pathos in an essay

Pathos in an essay is an ability to evoke certain feelings in the audience’s mind gs (e.g., joy, sadness, anger, etc.) through verbal images. If your paper is about a particular football team and the purpose of your essay is to convince the reader that it is worth sponsoring, using pathos in writing can be a good strategy. Your primary goal is to arouse certain feelings in the readers’ minds to influence the audience’s thoughts and ideas concerning a specific issue. Let’s stick with the football topic and check out some useful tips for applying pathos in your writing:

Recall some great achievements of that team
Emphasize the successes of a particular player
Evoke pity by mentioning the coach’s family issues

In the modern world, anything that causes emotions and makes people feel sympathetic brings the best results. Now that you know how to use pathos in an essay, you are ready to make the final step and study logos.

Logos in an essay

Being a purely logical device, logos represents a way of belief through logical constructions. There is nothing to beat a well-applied logos in an essay. For example, your university football team need to make it to the semi-final, because it will raise the students’ self-esteem and improve their school’s reputation. Achievements like this are always important because they ensure an enjoyable school life. This is also proof that you can win when you want it. If you use logos in writing appropriately, you’ll be able to boost the football team’s morale and thus help them beat anyone. Let’s take a different topic and analyze some tips on how to use logos in an essay:

Study all the possible “cause and effect” situations carefully
Make sure to use reliable sources
Include data or ideas holding universal truths

It is guaranteed that with these tips for applying logos in your writing you will succeed in persuading anyone.

Use of ethos-pathos-logos: Essay outline

We’d like to provide you with an essay outline showing how you can use your newly acquired knowledge in practice. Imagine writing a persuasive paper on Sociology — this topic has a lot of aspects to discuss and a lot of ideas to develop.

Introduction
- Here comes your thesis statement with your central idea.
- Your task is to show that your idea is the only right one.
Body part
- Ethos:
  - You have studied Sociology by yourself
  - Someone from your family has a degree in Sociology
  - You have experienced something that helped you come up with a specific idea
- Pathos:
  - Your topic is important for a lot of people
  - This issue can make many people happy/unhappy
  - Problems interconnected with your theme can lead to serious consequences
- Logos:
Conclusion
- Make sure that you mentioned all evidence and that your viewpoint is rocksolid.

Using this ethos-pathos-logos essay outline, you can develop your original and unique writing style. Don’t be afraid of expressing exciting ideas, because when you know everything about the main concepts of rhetoric, you can convince anyone.