The importance of Pathos (Ch. 21)

Aristotle said it best when he came up with the idea of pathos. he felt that it was important for a speaker to be able to appeal to the emotions of an audience in order to help fuel civic decision making. Again, I am glad that the author used MLK's famous speech as an example to explain Aristotle's theory of rhetoric. Throughout the entire speech, MLK does nothing but appeal to the emotions of his audience. He continuously spoke of equality and change within the nation, and that is the very thing that the audience was looking for in a leader at the time. But what is good is that MLK greatly helped fuel a lot of the changes that occured after this time period. He was heard not only by the black community but obviously policy makers who were obviously predominantly white. MLK followed Aristotle's idea of Love/Friendship vs. Hatred. He constantly pointed out his similar goals that he had with his audience in order to show his audience that created an idea of warmth about his character. He showed that he generally cared about what was happening within the commmunity, and that something needed to be done about it. I think this is one of the more important of all the three appeals for a speaker, only because a person's emotions is very strong. Although sometimes we say it is more important to think with our minds and not our hearts, at the end of the day, we make a lot of decisions based on how we feel more than how we think. If a speaker taps into an audience's emotions, the audience will feel warmth from that speaker, and that will make them listen to the speaker's message more.