Ethos, logos and pathos in university students’ informal requests
Persuasion is used in spoken and written communication to convince the audience to take appropriate actions or to support specific viewpoints. The speaker or writer may use statistics and logical arguments, emotions and their character, authority and credibility to convince the audience. The pres...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2018
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13591/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13591/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/13591/1/23387-69281-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | Persuasion is used in spoken and written communication to convince the audience to take
appropriate actions or to support specific viewpoints. The speaker or writer may use statistics
and logical arguments, emotions and their character, authority and credibility to convince the
audience. The present study examined university students’ strategies of persuading their
lecturer to grant their request using Aristotle’s rhetorical proofs of ethos, logos and pathos as
the framework. The data were from 165 students enrolled in an English language course in a
Malaysian university. They were asked to write down what they would say to persuade their
lecturer to end the class early. Some students used more than one strategy, giving rise to 180
persuasion strategies in total. Analysis of their requests showed that majority of the students
used one type of rhetorical appeal to persuade. Emotional appeal (pathos) was the most
popular persuasion strategy accounting for over half of the persuasion strategies identified,
followed closely by the rational appeal (logos). Appeal to ethos (credibility) was seldom
used. Further analysis of the use of personal pronouns showed a clear difference in that selffocus
is frequent in appeals to logos whereas other-focus is frequent in appeals to pathos.
When students made an appeal to logos in their requests, they used the singular first person
pronoun (I, my) more than the second person pronoun because they justified their request for
an early class dismissal by using their heavy workload and uncomfortable physical classroom
conditions. When the students made emotional appeals, the content of their persuasion
revolved around their lecturer and they made frequent use of the second person pronoun. The
results suggests that the students can benefit from the teaching of persuasive discourse so that
they are able to use the rhetorical appeals more effectively. |
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