Summer Assignment 2!

   When it comes to finding ways of persuasion, or anything involving persuasion, three main things always come up. Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, or "the Three Appeals," are what commonly comes to mind. Ethos is when an argument is being supported or stated by someone with authority such as a celebrity or a renowned brain surgeon.  Pathos is a play on emotions. You can commonly see Pathos in commercials involving pet adoptions, where they show sad puppies and play sorrowful music. The final of the three appeals is Logos. Logos uses facts, such as percentages, charts, basically information, as a form of persuasion. Each of these three may sound great, but they each have there flaws. 

    Using an authoritative figure may make the argument more appealing because of the basic idea of "well if that famous persons saying it, then it MUST be true." But as you might guess, that can cause some problems since, where are the facts? Where is the proof? Pathos uses your conscience against you. It brings tears to your eyes and almost makes you feel like you absolutely need to agree. The issue with pathos is that the author has to know how the audience already feels toward a certain subject, to make sure that they persuade and not accidentally end up doing the opposite. Logos is the only one that seems to use facts and not emotion or authority. It gives the straight, hard facts, and that can sometimes be the downfall to using this argue. Most people, most audiences, find numbers and facts to be boring and not very entertaining to read about. It can make it a little hard to persuade an audience when they're not really connecting to the text. 

     In the book that we have been reading for the past month now Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, we can see that the author uses Logos quite a bit. When Mihaly discusses how people attempt to overlook all the bad that seems to be happening in the world he basically says that no matter how hard people can try and overlook this, there are still the facts such as when he states, "In the United states the per-capita frequency of violent crimes-murder, rape, robbery, assault-increased by well over 300 percent." Here Mihaly is trying to persuade readers to see that there is an issue here in our world. That bad things do happen, and here are the facts to show that. "Between 1950 and 1980 teenage suicides increased by over 300 percent." Mihaly also tries to show that "the level of knowledge... seems to be declining." " The average math score on the SAT tests was 466 in 1967. In 1984 it was 426." Mihaly throws fact, after fact, out at the reader. Showing cold hard proof that the world is not perfect. He himself says " The ostrich's strategy for avoiding bad news is hardly productive." 

   Along with Logos, we see a fair amount of Ethos. Mihaly continuously uses quotes from famous lecturers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other known professors. At one point in the book, Mihaly is discussing this idea of hope, or "which will occur in the future." Mihaly discusses the idea of how were always told to wait and something good will happen tomorrow, or do something good today and you'll get rewarded later. Mihaly calls it "the postponement of gratification." To further push this point, he uses a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, '"We are always getting to live, but never living." During this same part of the book, over the same discussion Mihaly uses Pathos at the same time to also the push the point that we are always told to wait to achieve satisfaction. "The company vice president tells junior employees to have patience and work hard, because one of these days they will be promoted.... the golden years of retirement beckon." Here Mihaly basically makes the assumption that the majority of his audience will have worked and felt that need to move up at a job and eventually look forward to retirement. He plays on our emotions by putting that idea of hope that we've all felt at least once, to strive for something better. To veer back to Ethos, when discussing paths of liberation and how our conscious is what determines our quality of life, Mihaly mentions Aristotle, "It was clearly recognized by Aristotle, whose notion of the virtuous activity of the soul prefigures the argument of this book." Aristotle is a very well recognized Greek philosopher and using him as a supporter of his argument was a  great way to really make his argument shine. 

   Out of the three appeals, it seems like pathos was not used very much throughout the book. I found this to be very odd since the purpose of this book is to find a way to achieve the emotion, happiness. The lack of pathos may be because he assumed the audience might be of an older age group where in that case using more of a factual text might get to them more clearly and be more persuasive.