It is hard to overestimate the importance and the power of the second mode of persuasion, pathos, in creating arguments.  Pathos, Greek for "emotion," indicates an appeal to the emotions of an audience, or, as Aristotle puts it, "Creating a certain disposition in the audience" (Rhetoric 1356a).  If a writer or speaker attempts to arouse anger, fear, pity, indignation, or other emotion in her audience, she is making an emotional appeal.  We all see such appeals every day.  For example, on any given night, one might see the following TV commercials:

• A young man who believes he is beginning to go bald tells the camera he is afraid that, if he loses his hair, he will also lose his girlfriend.  The girlfriend says to him, "I would love you anyway," but the young man is not convinced.  The commercial assures us that fortunately there is a product available to dispel these fears and help people grow new hair. 
  

• Over a series of shots of starving, fly-covered children in a faraway country, a narrator asks viewers to send money to a nonprofit organization in order to save these children's lives.
  

• To counter the bad rap they have received from consumer groups, some in the media, and a few politicians, pharmaceutical industries and tobacco companies run commercials showing how they provide a caring, human touch in responding to illnesses such as leukemia and helping communities survive natural disasters such as floods.                 

Of course, the degrees to which these commercials, and the scores of other public texts that use pathos to persuade, possess or lack moral integrity, tastefulness, and truthfulness are open to consideration and judgment.  But there is no denying the power of emotions to persuade.  There is nothing inherently wrong with appealing to the emotions of an audience.  We are, after all, humans, and not completely objective, Mr. Spock-like beings.  There are a number of issues that seem to be, by their very nature, emotionally charged (one may think, for starters, of abortion and flag burning as two examples), and there is no way to completely escape the emotional elements in these and many other issues.  One should be careful to not overuse pathos in building arguments.  Cicero, the Roman statesman and rhetorician, stated that nothing dries so quickly as a tear.  Emotion, alone, is seldom enough to give an idea or argument enough backing.

The following excerpt, from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949), dramatizes the author's change of heart on the wisdom of hunting predators, namely wolves, out of existence.  Throughout the book, Leopold demonstrates an almost unparalleled knowledge of natural history.  This passage makes use of a strong emotional appeal, but it is balanced with a strong ethos and sense of ethics:

We were eating lunch on a high rimrock, at the foot of which a turbulent river elbowed its way.  We saw what we thought was a doe fording the torrent, her breast awash in white water.  When she climbed the bank toward us and shook out her tail, we realized our error: it was a wolf.  A half-dozen others, evidently grown pups, sprang from the willows and all joined in a welcoming mêlée of wagging tales and playful maulings.  What was literally a pile of wolves writhed and tumbled in the center of an open flat at the foot of our rimrock.

In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf.  In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing.  When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.  

Unlike ethos and logos, which are both always present in all arguments, it is perhaps possible to make an argument that has little or no emotional appeal.  Yet one always writes an argument for a specific audience or set of audiences.  It is crucial for writers to know that, excepting perhaps grocery lists and the like, people rarely write in a social vacuum, with no concern for how their words will be received by their audiences.  Sophisticated writers are always aware of audience.  Unsophisticated writers rarely take audience into account when they write, assuming that everyone either already thinks the way they do, or that their readers bloody well will believe as they do after reading their text.        

Argument calls for a set of shared assumptions between the writer and audience.  There is usually a large, accommodating "middle ground" on any subject to which writers can appeal.  Everyone, or practically everyone, agrees with the principle that the environment should be clean and safe, but the degrees and costs of realizing or maintaining that clean, safe environment are and will continue to be a matter of disagreement.  (In argument, the devil is always in the details.)  The majority of any given audience will agree that violent crime in the U.S. is something that needs remedying, but note that this shared assumption could be the starting point for arguments both in favor of and against gun control.  Aristotle writes in his treatise Rhetoric, "It is easy to praise Athenians among Athenians"; but it is quite another thing to praise Athenians among a group of Spartans. Similarly, it is easy to argue against stricter handgun laws to a group of NRA members and gun enthusiasts, but the effective  anti-handgun law speaker must change the way he argues those views in, say, a church in an inner city that has been particularly plagued by handgun violence.   

Sometimes, often in fact, the writer needs to explain why his argument is something worthy of his audience's consideration, why his argument is an argument, or even what the basics facts are that comprise the issue.  Establishing a proper relationship with audience is especially important at the beginning of a text.  In his book Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, Edward P. J. Corbett writes that in introductions, "Sometimes writers have to convince an audience that they are qualified to speak on some subject.  At other times, they must counteract prejudices or misconceptions either about themselves or about the subject of their discourse.  Or they must rouse hostility toward those whose point of view they are going to oppose in their discourse."  

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