5: Writing Effective Arguments
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- 5.2: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos
- In order to persuade a particular audience of a particular point, a writer makes decisions about how best to convince the reader. Aristotle recognized three basic appeals that a writer (or orator) should consider when presenting an argument: logos, ethos, and pathos.
- 5.3: Evidence
- Primary Evidence is the thing we study. In academic writing, this kind of evidence differs according to discipline. In biology and chemistry, primary evidence can be an experiment’s results. In the field of history, it might be a letter written by a World War I soldier, a memo issued by a U.S. president, a Civil War bullet, or cave drawings. In sociology, it can be the data gathered from participant surveys (quantitative) or information arising from a case study (qualitative).
- 5.4: Literary Analysis Arguments
- Analysis means to break something down in order to better understand how it works. To analyze a literary work is to pull it apart and look at its discrete components to see how those components contribute to the meaning and/or effect of the whole. Thus, a literary analysis argument considers what has been learned in analyzing a work (What do the parts look like and how do they function?) and forwards a particular perspective on their contribution to the whole.
