Prop up that triangle with The Rhetorical Arch, Part 5: Pathos

Several years ago, I attended a conference where a friend of mine, an aerospace engineer, was presenting. I attended his presentation, only to be completely lost after two minutes.

Does this mean my friend gave a bad presentation? Hardly. He tailored his presentation for people with similar backgrounds and interests, namely, other aerospace engineers. Not English majors. He could have changed his presentation – the delivery – so someone with a background in literature would be able to follow along, but English majors wouldn't care as much as his fellow engineers would.

This is Pathos: audience awareness, or how a message is tailored for an audience. It isn't enough to just produce information: it's necessary to consider where it's going and to fit it for that audience. For example, you'd probably describe Breaking Bad to your immediate friends differently than you would to your grandmother. Good Pathos requires you consider the interests, expertise, and backgrounds of your audience, no matter how broad or specific your audience is. If they're experts, then you'll be safe using specialized terminology and referencing other experts. If your audience are not experts, you'd need to simplify or approach it from whatever discipline they are knowledgeable in.

That having been said, Pathos is not the same as your audience, and it's dangerous to think of pathos as appealing to your audience's emotions (even though this is how it's frequently taught). First, Pathos is not your audience any more than Ethos is synonymous with author: rhetoric is not concerned with authors and audiences, but how authors and audiences are addressed and presented.

Second, emotions. Emotion is part of Pathos, but there are problems with equating the two. Identifying Pathos with emotions blurs the line between carefully writing for your audience and making Appeals to Emotion or Pity fallacies. Claiming Pathos is the audience's emotions or focusing exclusively on their emotions oversimplifies people to whatever they love, pity, or hate; and in turn either praising, bemoaning, or demonizing the issue so they agree with you, regardless of your message or its validity.

Meanwhile, many arguments and pieces of writing are carefully tailored for distinct audiences without relying on strong emotions. For example, textbooks. Textbooks for high school and introductory college courses tend to be more colorful, broken up into brief sections, provide definitions in margins and glossaries, and offer questions for discussions or assignments. However, a textbook for a more advanced class, like one used in a graduate course will feature fewer colors or images, if any, and may or may not feature a glossary. And that's just the design: the graduate level textbook will likely have fewer sections, no built-in assignments, and longer chapters, even longer paragraphs and sentences.

The reason for the difference is simple: an introductory textbook is written for students new to the field or taking a general education course. Rather than bog students down with thick, dense information, the authors instead aim for a design that's more appeasing to the eye and easier to understand. The graduate level textbook, however, is intended for students and scholars, people deeply committed to the field: they don't need to be wooed by bright colors and designs. These are the readers who voluntarily go to these books for the information, not out of obligation, so there's no need to soften it with colors, pictures, and designs, nor to simplify the concepts.

Pathos, therefore, is a matter of emotions, but not what topics or issues the audience likes or loathes, it’s presenting the information in a way they will like, to garner their attention and help them retain knowledge. Pathos is more than compelling anecdotes or expressing outrage at a situation: it is the consideration of the language used throughout and how it is the best language for the intended audience.