ABSTRACT
The preceding section’s student questions on style and content are also questions on ethos, pathos, and logos. Pathos, and logos, moving students past the threshold means moving them from a passive recognition of basic persuasive strategies to an expressive application of complex concepts. The superficial use of rhetorical concepts exemplifies the “suspended state in which understanding approximates to a kind of mimicry or lack of authenticity”. Students increase the likelihood that their readers will more fully and readily believe them when they are careful to create an academic ethos for themselves. A good step toward helping students conduct a finer-grained analyses of pathos is to brainstorm a list of emotions as a class. Students who drop random quotations into their essays regardless of their relevance could benefit from learning to identify warrants. The idea of a warrant is easier to understand through an example.
