The Basic Principles of writing persuasive pieces

Persuasive writing seeks to change, convince, or influence the actions and thoughts of the reader.  You will get others to accept your ideas or point of view if you:

1. Appeal to their reason
2. Appeal to their emotions
3. Appeal to our good characters

Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

          Ethos, pathos, and logos are types of persuasion that are used to convince the audience. Ethos or the ethical appeal means to convince an audience of the author’s credibility or character. The writer uses ethos to show his audience that he is a credible source of information and that he is worth listening to. The writer develops ethos through the choice of language, and this should be appropriate to the topic and audience. This means that the writer or speaker should be cognizant of the level of vocabulary.

Pathos or emotional appeal means to persuade an audience by appealing to their emotions. Writers use pathos to raise sympathy from an audience; to make the audience feel what the author wants them to feel. Also, pathos would be to pull compassion from an audience. Another use of pathos would be to inspire anger from an audience and provoke an action. Pathos can be established by using significant language, emotional tone, emotion-evoking examples, stories of emotional events, and implied meanings. Logos or the appeal to logic means to convince an audience by use of logic or reason. One uses logos to refer to facts and statistics, historical and literal comparisons, and citing certain authorities on a subject. Logos can be developed by using advanced, theoretical, or abstract language, citing facts (very important), using historical and literal analogies, and constructing logical arguments.