A P P E A L S T O P A T H O S

O r , I m a g i n i n g a n A u d i e n c e f o r t h e A u d i e n c e

A successful rhetor not only knows who his or her audience is literally; she imagines them
through her discourse, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) creating an image in words in
which the audience can see themselves.
The purpose of creating such an image is to connect with the audience (or some segment
thereof) in ways that advance the rhetor’s cause. An audience doesn’t find arguments
persuasive or unpersuasive based solely on their logical merits. For one thing, the
questions that we debate in a rhetorical situation are questions about which reasonable
people may disagree. That is, in the course of debating the question, we’ll discover several
competing lines of logically and factually valid argument. What’s more, these arguments
take on meaning by virtue of a broader context of beliefs and values, etc.
To be persuasive, then, a rhetor must evoke a context that s/he and her audience share
and embed his or her argument in it. This is where appeals to pathos come in. “Pathos” is
a Greek word. In English, it is often translated as “emotion,” but the meaning of the word
is broader than that. It refers not only to emotions as conventionally understood (e.g.,
anger, joy, fear, etc.) but to the whole network of attitudes, assumptions, feelings, etc.,
that underlie and inform rational thought. Appeals to pathos, then, seek to tap into that
underlying network. By appealing to pathos, a rhetor seeks to evoke the context of beliefs,
values, and feelings that s/he and her audience share, in order to make his or her argument
meaningful and credible.
Here are five kinds of pathetic appeals. Note that these appeals can overlap with one
another (as well as with other sorts of appeal (for example, to ethos or logos), which we’ll
discuss later.
• Direct address, i.e., speaking to the audience directly — as a “you” — as if conducting a
conversation. Here’s an example from MLK’s “I Have a Dream:”
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and
tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you
have come from areas where your quest —quest for freedom left you battered by
the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You
have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that
unearned suffering is redemptive.
By implicitly comparing the experience of persecution that Civil Rights activists have
endured to biblical martyrs, King encourages his audience to see themselves as spiritual
heroes, as people whose suffering is serving to bring about a more just world.
• Indirect address, i.e., speaking about the audience (or a segment of it). An example
from Martin Luther King:
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later,
the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the
chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely
island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred
years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and
finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize
a shameful condition.
By speaking about the African American community and the injustices it has suffered, King
both evokes feelings of outrage in his audience while at the same time establishing a
distance between the victims of injustice and the audience itself — even those who have
been the victims of the injustices described. That is, by saying “the Negro still is not free. .
. . the Negro is still sadly crippled. . . ,” instead of “you are not free” or “we are not free,”
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O r , I m a g i n i n g a n A u d i e n c e f o r t h e A u d i e n c e

etc., King discourages his audience from seeing themselves principally as the victims of
injustice; instead, they are encouraged to see themselves as agents in the fight against
injustice.
• Direct identification, i.e., asserting that that the rhetor and his/her audience are a
“we.” An example from King:
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm
threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our
rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy
our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We
must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We
must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again
and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with
soul force.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must
not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as
evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is
tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is
inextricably bound to our freedom.
We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.
We cannot turn back.
In this passage, King starts out by referring to a “we” that consists of himself and the
African American community. But he then invokes an allied “they” — the white people who
have joined in the Civil Rights Movement. By the end of the passage, the “we” has enlarged
to encompass both black and white activists: it is this, larger, multiracial “we” who “cannot
walk alone,” “cannot turn back.”
• Indirect identification, i.e., speaking or behaving in ways that suggest to the audience
that the rhetor is “one of us.” An example:
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects
of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every
American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as
well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on
this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of
honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check,
a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
Here King moves from a formal, very stately register to the language of everyday life. He
begins by quoting the formal language of America’s founding documents, then makes a joke
(albeit a serious one), drawn from ordinary, everyday experience, in which he compares
those documents to a bad check.
• Invoking a third party, i.e., talking about someone or some group who is not
understood to be party to the discourse, but with whom the audience can identify or
identify against. An example:
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its
governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and
"nullification" -- one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls
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O r , I m a g i n i n g a n A u d i e n c e f o r t h e A u d i e n c e

will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and
brothers.
This is the one moment in the speech wherein King actively excludes someone from the
open, welcoming, all-embracing “we” that he’s been crafting throughout. The excluded
group consists of racists, and specifically Governor George Wallace, who, just a few months
before King’s speech, gave a speech of his own in which he vowed to defend segregation.
By painting such an unflattering portrait of the governor, King encourages his audience to
identify against Wallace and his ilk, i.e., to define themselves in part by who they are not.