Unit V Discussion Board

9From Ethos to LogosAppealing to Your Readers

Your understanding of your readers influences how you see a particular situation, define an issue, explain the ongoing conversation surrounding that issue, and formulate a question. You may need to read widely to understand how different writers have dealt with the issue you address. And you will need to anticipate how others might respond to your argument — whether they will be sympathetic or antagonistic — and to compose your essay so that readers will “listen” whether or not they agree with you.

To achieve these goals, you will no doubt use reason in the form of evidence to sway readers. But you can also use other means of persuasion. That is, you can use your own character, by presenting yourself as someone who is knowledgeable, fair, and just, and you can appeal to your readers’ emotions. Although you may believe that reason alone should provide the means for changing people’s minds, people’s emotions also color the way they see the world.

Your audience is more than your immediate reader — your instructor or a peer. Your audience encompasses those you cite in writing about an issue and those you anticipate responding to your argument. This is true no matter what you write about, whether it be an interpretation of the novels of a particular author, an analysis of the cultural work of horror films, the ethics of treating boys and girls differently in schools, or the moral issues surrounding homelessness in America.

In this chapter we discuss different ways of engaging your readers, centering on three kinds of appeals: ethos, appeals from character; pathos, appeals to emotion; and logos, appeals to reason. Ethos, pathos, and logos are terms derived from ancient Greek writers, but they are still of great value today when considering how to persuade your audience. Readers will judge your writing on whether or not you present an argument that is fair and just, one that creates a sense of goodwill. All three appeals rely on these qualities.

Figure 9.1 , the rhetorical triangle, visually represents the interrelationship among ethos, pathos, and logos. Who we think our readers are (pathos: which of their emotions do we appeal to?) influences decisions about the ways we should represent ourselves to them (ethos: how can we come across as fair, credible, and just?). In turn, we use certain patterns of argument (logos: how do we arrange our words to make our case?) that reflect our interpretation of the situation to which we respond and that we believe will persuade readers to accept our point of view. Effective communication touches on each of the three points of the triangle. Your task as a writer is to determine the proper balance of these different appeals in your argument, based on your thesis, the circumstances, and your audience.

FIGURE 9.1The Rhetorical Triangle

CONNECTING WITH READERS: A SAMPLE ARGUMENT

To see how an author connects with his audience, read the following excerpt from James W. Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. As you read the excerpt, note Loewen’s main points and select key examples that illustrate his argument. As a class, test the claims he makes: To what extent do you believe that what Loewen argues is true? This may entail recalling your own experiences in high school history classes or locating one or more of the books that Loewen mentions.

JAMES W. LOEWEN

The Land of Opportunity

In addition to Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995, 2007), James Loewen, who holds a PhD in sociology, has written several other books, including Lies across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (1999) and Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005). As the titles of these books suggest, Loewen is a writer who questions the assumptions about history that many people take for granted. This is especially true of the following excerpt, from a chapter in which Loewen challenges a common American belief — that everyone has an equal chance in what he calls the “land of opportunity” — by arguing that we live in a class system that privileges some people and raises barriers for others. History textbook writers, he points out, are guilty of complicity in this class system because they leave a great deal of history out of their textbooks.

High school students have eyes, ears, and television sets (all too many have their own TV sets), so they know a lot about relative privilege in America. They measure their family’s social position against that of other families, and their community’s position against other communities. Middle-class students, especially, know little about how the American class structure works, however, and nothing at all about how it has changed over time. These students do not leave high school merely ignorant of the workings of the class structure; they come out as terrible sociologists. “Why are people poor?” I have asked first-year college students. Or, if their own class position is one of relative privilege, “Why is your family well-off?” The answers I’ve received, to characterize them charitably, are half-formed and naïve. The students blame the poor for not being successful. They have no understanding of the ways that opportunity is not equal in America and no notion that social structure pushes people around, influencing the ideas they hold and the lives they fashion.

High school history textbooks can take some of the credit for this state of affairs. Some textbooks do cover certain high points of labor history, such as the 1894 Pullman strike near Chicago that President Cleveland broke with federal troops, or the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire that killed 146 women in New York City, but the most recent event mentioned in most books is the Taft-Hartley Act of sixty years ago. No book mentions any of the major strikes that labor lost in the late twentieth century, such as the 1985 Hormel meatpackers’ strike in Austin, Minnesota, or the 1991 Caterpillar strike in Decatur, Illinois — defeats that signify labor’s diminished power today. Nor do most textbooks describe any continuing issues facing labor, such as the growth of multinational corporations and their exporting of jobs overseas. With such omissions, textbook authors can construe labor history as something that happened long ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago. It logically follows that unions now appear anachronistic. The idea that they might be necessary for workers to have a voice in the workplace goes unstated.

These books’ poor treatment of labor history is magnificent compared to their treatment of social class. Nothing that textbooks discuss — not even strikes — is ever anchored in any analysis of social class.1 This amounts to delivering the footnotes instead of the lecture! Half of the eighteen high school American history textbooks I examined contain no index listing at all for social class, social stratification, class structure, income distribution, inequality, or any conceivably related topic. Not one book lists upper class or lower class. Three list middle class, but only to assure students that America is a middle-class country. “Except for slaves, most of the colonists were members of the ‘middling ranks,’ ” says Land of Promise, and nails home the point that we are a middle-class country by asking students to “describe three ‘middle-class’ values that united free Americans of all classes.” Several of the textbooks note the explosion of middle-class suburbs after World War II. Talking about the middle class is hardly equivalent to discussing social stratification, however. On the contrary, as Gregory Mantsios has pointed out, “such references appear to be acceptable precisely because they mute class differences.”2

Stressing how middle-class we all are is increasingly problematic today, because the proportion of households earning between 75 percent and 125 percent of the median income has fallen steadily since 1967. The Reagan-Bush administrations accelerated this shrinkage of the middle class, and most families who left its ranks fell rather than rose.3 As late as 1970, family incomes in the United States were only slightly less equal than in Canada. By 2000, inequality here was much greater than Canada’s; the United States was becoming more like Mexico, a very stratified society.4 The Bush II administration, with its tax cuts aimed openly at the wealthy, continued to increase the gap between the haves and have-nots. This is the kind of historical trend one would think history books would take as appropriate subject matter, but only five of the eighteen books in my sample provide any analysis of social stratification in the United States. Even these fragmentary analyses are set mostly in colonial America. Boorstin and Kelley, unusual in actually including social class in its index, lists only social classes in 1790 and social classes in early America. These turn out to be two references to the same paragraph, which tells us that England “was a land of rigid social classes,” while here in America “social classes were much more fluid.” “One great difference between colonial and European society was that the colonists had more social mobility,” echoes The American Tradition. Never mind that the most violent class conflicts in American history — Bacon’s Rebellion and Shays’s Rebellion — took place in and just after colonial times. Textbooks still say that colonial society was relatively classless and marked by upward mobility.

And things have only gotten rosier since. “By 1815,” The Challenge of Freedom assures us, two classes had withered away and “America was a country of middle class people and of middle class goals.” This book returns repeatedly, every fifty years or so, to the theme of how open opportunity is in America. The stress on upward mobility is striking. There is almost nothing in any of these textbooks about class inequalities or barriers of any kind to social mobility. “What conditions made it possible for poor white immigrants to become richer in the colonies?” Land of Promise asks. “What conditions made/make it difficult?” goes unasked. Boorstin and Kelley close their sole discussion of social class (in 1790, described above) with the happy sentence, “As the careers of American Presidents would soon show, here a person might rise by hard work, intelligence, skill, and perhaps a little luck, from the lowest positions to the highest.”

If only that were so! Social class is probably the single most important variable in society. From womb to tomb, it correlates with almost all other social characteristics of people that we can measure. Affluent expectant mothers are more likely to get prenatal care, receive current medical advice, and enjoy general health, fitness, and nutrition. Many poor and working-class mothers-to-be first contact the medical profession in the last month, sometimes the last hours, of their pregnancies. Rich babies come out healthier and weighing more than poor babies. The infants go home to very different situations. Poor babies are more likely to have high levels of poisonous lead in their environments and their bodies. Rich babies get more time and verbal interaction with their parents and higher quality day care when not with their parents. When they enter kindergarten, and through the twelve years that follow, rich children benefit from suburban schools that spend two to three times as much money per student as schools in inner cities or impoverished rural areas. Poor children are taught in classes that are often 50 percent larger than the classes of affluent children. Differences such as these help account for the higher school-dropout rate among poor children.

Even when poor children are fortunate enough to attend the same school as rich children, they encounter teachers who expect only children of affluent families to know the right answers. Social science research shows that teachers are often surprised and even distressed when poor children excel. Teachers and counselors believe they can predict who is “college material.” Since many working-class children give off the wrong signals, even in first grade, they end up in the “general education” track in high school. “If you are the child of low-income parents, the chances are good that you will receive limited and often careless attention from adults in your high school,” in the words of Theodore Sizer’s bestselling study of American high schools, Horace’s Compromise. “If you are the child of upper-middle-income parents, the chances are good that you will receive substantial and careful attention.”5 Researcher Reba Page has provided vivid accounts of how high school American history courses use rote learning to turn off lower-class students.6 Thus schools have put into practice Woodrow Wilson’s recommendation: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”7

As if this unequal home and school life were not enough, rich teenagers then enroll in the Princeton Review or other coaching sessions for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Even without coaching, affluent children are advantaged because their background is similar to that of the test makers, so they are comfortable with the vocabulary and subtle subcultural assumptions of the test. To no one’s surprise, social class correlates strongly with SAT scores.

All these are among the reasons that social class predicts the rate of college attendance and the type of college chosen more effectively than does any other factor, including intellectual ability, however measured. After college, most affluent children get white-collar jobs, most working-class children get blue-collar jobs, and the class differences continue. As adults, rich people are more likely to have hired an attorney and to be a member of formal organizations that increase their civic power. Poor people are more likely to watch TV. Because affluent families can save some money while poor families must spend what they make, wealth differences are ten times larger than income differences. Therefore most poor and working-class families cannot accumulate the down payment required to buy a house, which in turn shuts them out from our most important tax shelter, the write-off of home mortgage interest. Working-class parents cannot afford to live in elite subdivisions or hire high-quality day care, so the process of educational inequality replicates itself in the next generation. Finally, affluent Americans also have longer life expectancies than lower- and working-class people, the largest single cause of which is better access to health care. Echoing the results of Helen Keller’s study of blindness, research has determined that poor health is not distributed randomly about the social structure but is concentrated in the lower class. Social Security then become a huge transfer system, using monies contributed by all Americans to pay benefits disproportionately to longer-lived affluent Americans.

Ultimately social class determines how people think about social class. When asked if poverty in America is the fault of the poor or the fault of the system, 57 percent of business leaders blamed the poor; just 9 percent blamed the system. Labor leaders showed sharply reversed choices: only 15 percent said the poor were at fault while 56 percent blamed the system. (Some people replied “don’t know” or chose a middle position.) The largest single difference between our two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class: 55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.8

Few of these statements are news, I know, which is why I have not bothered to document most of them, but the majority of high school students do not know or understand these ideas. Moreover, the processes have changed over time, for the class structure in America today is not the same as it was in 1890, let alone in colonial America. Yet in the most recent American Pageant, for example, social class goes unmentioned in the twentieth century. Many teachers compound the problem by avoiding talking about social class in the twenty-first. A study of history and social studies teachers “revealed that they had a much broader knowledge of the economy, both academically and experientially, than they admitted in class.” Teachers “expressed fear that students might find out about the injustices and inadequacies of their economic and political institutions.”9 By never blaming the system, American history courses thus present Republican history.

Reading as a Writer

1. List what you think are Loewen’s main points. What appeals does he seem to draw on most when he makes those points: appeals based on his own character (ethos), on the emotions of his reader (pathos), or on the reasonableness of his evidence (logos)? Are the appeals obvious or difficult to tease out? Does he combine them? Discuss your answers with your classmates.

2. Identify what you think is the main claim of Loewen’s argument, and choose key examples to support your answer. Compare your chosen claim and examples to those chosen by your classmates. Do they differ significantly? Can you agree on Loewen’s gist and his key examples?

3. As a class, test the claims Loewen makes by thinking about your own experiences in high school history classes. Do you remember finding out that something you were taught from an American history textbook was not true? Did you discover on your own what you considered to be misrepresentations in or important omissions from your textbook? If so, did these misrepresentations or omissions tend to support or contradict the claims about history textbooks that Loewen makes?

APPEALING TO ETHOS

Although we like to believe that our decisions and beliefs are based on reason and logic, in fact they are often based on what amounts to character judgments. That is, if a person you trust makes a reasonable argument for one choice, and a person you distrust makes a reasonable argument for another choice, you are more likely to be swayed by the argument of the person you trust. Similarly, the audience for your argument will be more disposed to agree with you if its members believe you are a fair, just person who is knowledgeable and has good judgment. Even the most well-developed argument will fall short if you do not leave this kind of impression on your readers. Thus, it is not surprising that ethos may be the most important component of your argument.

There are three strategies for evoking a sense of ethos:

1. Establish that you have good judgment.

2. Convey to readers that you are knowledgeable.

3. Show that you understand the complexity of the issue.

These strategies are interrelated: A writer who demonstrates good judgment is more often than not someone who is both knowledgeable about an issue and who acknowledges the complexity of it by weighing the strengths and weaknesses of different arguments. However, keep in mind that these characteristics do not exist apart from what readers think and believe.

◼ Establish That You Have Good Judgment

Most readers of academic writing expect writers to demonstrate good judgment by identifying a problem that readers agree is worth addressing. In turn, good judgment gives writers credibility.

Loewen crafts his introduction to capture the attention of educators as well as concerned citizens when he claims that students leave high school unaware of class structure and as a consequence “have no understanding of the ways that opportunity is not equal in America and no notion that social structure pushes people around, influencing the ideas they hold and the lives they fashion” (para. 1). Loewen does not blame students, or even instructors, for this lack of awareness. Instead, he writes, “textbooks can take some of the credit for this state of affairs” (para. 2) because, among other shortcomings, they leave out important events in “labor history” and relegate issues facing labor to the past.

Whether an educator — or a general reader for that matter — will ultimately agree with Loewen’s case is, at this point, up for grabs, but certainly the possibility that high schools in general, and history textbooks in particular, are failing students by leaving them vulnerable to class-based manipulation would be recognized as a problem by readers who believe America should be a society that offers equal opportunity for all. At this point, Loewen’s readers are likely to agree that the problem of omission he identifies may be significant if its consequences are as serious as he believes them to be.

Writers also establish good judgment by conveying to readers that they are fair-minded and just and have the best interests of readers in mind. Loewen is particularly concerned that students understand the persistence of poverty and inequality in the United States and the historical circumstances of the poor, which they cannot do unless textbook writers take a more inclusive approach to addressing labor history, especially “the growth of multinational corporations and their exporting of jobs overseas” (para. 2). It’s not fair to deny this important information to students, and it’s not fair to the poor to leave them out of official histories of the United States. Loewen further demonstrates that he is fair and just when he calls attention in paragraph 6 to the inequality between rich and poor children in schools, a problem that persists despite our forebears’ belief that class would not determine the fate of citizens of the United States.

◼ Convey to Readers That You Are Knowledgeable

Being thoughtful about a subject goes hand in hand with being knowledgeable about the subject. Loewen demonstrates his knowledge of class issues and their absence from textbooks in a number of ways (not the least of which is his awareness that a problem exists — many people, including educators, may not be aware of this problem).

In paragraph 3, Loewen makes a bold claim: “Nothing that textbooks discuss — not even strikes — is ever anchored in any analysis of social class.” As readers, we cannot help wondering: How does the author know this? How will he support this claim? Loewen anticipates these questions by demonstrating that he has studied the subject through a systematic examination of American history textbooks. He observes that half of the eighteen textbooks he examined “contain no index listing at all for social class, social stratification, class structure, income distribution, inequality, or any conceivably related topic” and that “not one book lists upper class or lower class.” Loewen also demonstrates his grasp of class issues in American history, from the “violent class conflicts” that “took place in and just after colonial times” (para. 4), which contradict textbook writers’ assertions that class conflicts did not exist during this period, to the more recent conflicts in the 1980s and early 1990s (paras. 2 and 4).

Moreover, Loewen backs up his own study of textbooks with references to a number of studies from the social sciences to illustrate that “social class is probably the single most important variable in society” (para. 6). Witness the statistics and findings he cites in paragraphs 6 through 10. The breadth of Loewen’s historical knowledge and the range of his reading should convince readers that he is knowledgeable, and his trenchant analysis contributes to the authority he brings to the issue and to his credibility.

◼ Show That You Understand the Complexity of a Given Issue

Recognizing the complexity of an issue helps readers see the extent to which authors know that any issue can be understood in a number of different ways. Loewen acknowledges that most of the history he recounts is not “news” (para. 11) to his educated readers, who by implication “know” and “understand” his references to historical events and trends. What may be news to his readers, he explains, is the extent to which class structure in the United States has changed over time. With the steady erosion of middle-class households since 1967, “class inequalities” and “barriers . . . to social mobility” (para. 5) are limiting more and more Americans’ access to even the most fundamental of opportunities in a democratic society — health care and education.

Still, even though Loewen has introduced new thinking about the nature of class in the United States and has demonstrated a provocative play of mind by examining an overlooked body of data (high school history textbooks) that may influence the way class is perceived in America, there are still levels of complexity he hasn’t addressed explicitly. Most important, perhaps, is the question of why history textbooks continue to ignore issues of class when there is so much research that indicates its importance in shaping the events history textbooks purport to explain.

Steps to Appealing to Ethos

1. Establish that you have good judgment. Identify an issue your readers will agree is worth addressing, and demonstrate that you are fair-minded and have the best interests of your readers in mind when you address it.

2. Convey to readers that you are knowledgeable. Support your claims with credible evidence that shows you have read widely on, thought about, and understand the issue.

3. Show that you understand the complexity of the issue. Demonstrate that you understand the variety of viewpoints your readers may bring — or may not be able to bring — to the issue.

APPEALING TO PATHOS

An appeal to pathos recognizes that people are moved to action by their emotions as well as by reasonable arguments. In fact, pathos is a vital part of argument that can predispose readers one way or another. Do you want to arouse readers’ sympathy? Anger? Passion? You can do that by knowing what readers value.

Appeals to pathos are typically indirect. You can appeal to pathos by using examples or illustrations that you believe will arouse the appropriate emotions and by presenting them using an appropriate tone.

To acknowledge that writers play on readers’ emotions is not to endorse manipulative writing. Rather, it is to acknowledge that effective writers use all available means of persuasion to move readers to agree with them. After all, if your thoughtful reading and careful research have led you to believe that you must weigh in with a useful insight on an important issue, it stands to reason that you would want your argument to convince your readers to believe as strongly in what you assert as you do.

For example, if you genuinely believe that the conditions some families are living in are abysmal and unfair, you want your readers to believe it too. And an effective way to persuade them to believe as you do, in addition to convincing them of the reasonableness of your argument and of your own good character and judgment, is to establish a kind of emotional common ground in your writing — the common ground of pathos.

◼ Show That You Know What Your Readers Value

Let’s consider some of the ways James Loewen signals that he knows what his readers value.

In the first place, Loewen assumes that readers feel the same way he does: Educated people should know that the United States has a class structure despite the democratic principles that the nation was founded on. He also expects readers to identify with his unwillingness to accept the injustice that results from that class structure. He believes that women living in poverty should have access to appropriate health care, that children living in poverty should have a chance to attend college, and that certain classes of people should not be written off to, as Woodrow Wilson recommended, “perform specific difficult manual tasks” (para. 7).

Time and again, Loewen cites examples that reveal that the poor are discriminated against by the class structure in the United States not for lack of ability, lack of desire, lack of ambition, or lack of morality, but for no better reason than lack of money — and that such discrimination has been going on for a long time. He expects that his readers also will find such discrimination an unacceptable affront to their values of fair play and democracy and that they will experience the same sense of outrage that he does.

◼ Use Illustrations and Examples That Appeal to Readers’ Emotions

You can appeal to readers’ emotions indirectly through the illustrations and examples you use to support your argument.

For instance, in paragraph 2, Loewen contends that textbook writers share responsibility for high school students’ not knowing about the continued relevance of class issues in American life. Loewen’s readers — parents, educators, historians — may very well be angered by the omissions he points out. Certainly he would expect them to be angry when they read about the effects of economic class on the health care expectant mothers and then their children receive (para. 6) and on their children’s access to quality education (paras. 6–8). In citing the fact that social class “correlates strongly with SAT scores” (para. 8) and so “predicts the rate of college attendance and the type of college chosen” (para. 9), Loewen forces his readers to acknowledge that the educational playing field is far from level.

Finally, he calls attention to the fact that accumulated wealth accounts for deep class divisions in our society — that the inability to save prevents the poor from hiring legal counsel, purchasing a home, or taking advantage of tax shelters. The result, Loewen observes, is that “educational inequality replicates itself in the next generation” (para. 9).

Together, these examples strengthen both Loewen’s argument and what he hopes will be readers’ outrage that history textbooks do not address class issues. Without that information, Americans cannot fully understand or act to change the existing class structure.

◼ Consider How Your Tone May Affect Your Audience

The tone of your writing is your use of language that communicates your attitude toward yourself, your material, and your readers. Of course, your tone is important in everything you write, but it is particularly crucial when you are appealing to pathos.

When you are appealing to your readers’ emotions, it is tempting to use loaded, exaggerated, and even intemperate language to convey how you feel (and hope your readers will feel) about an issue. Consider these sentences: “The Republican Party has devised the most ignominious means of filling the pockets of corporations.” “These wretched children suffer heartrending agonies that can barely be imagined, much less described.” “The ethereal beauty of the Brandenburg concertos thrill one to the deepest core of one’s being.” All of these sentences express strong and probably sincere beliefs and emotions, but some readers might find them overwrought and coercive and question the writer’s reasonableness.

Similarly, some writers rely on irony or sarcasm to set the tone of their work. Irony is the use of language to say one thing while meaning quite another. Sarcasm is the use of heavy-handed irony to ridicule or attack someone or something. Although irony and sarcasm can make for vivid and entertaining writing, they also can backfire and end up alienating readers. The sentence “Liberals will be pleased to hear that the new budget will be making liberal use of their hard-earned dollars” may entertain some readers with its irony and wordplay, but others may assume that the writer’s attitude toward liberals is likely to result in an unfairly slanted argument. And the sentence “In my opinion, there’s no reason why Christians and Muslims shouldn’t rejoice together over the common ground of their both being deluded about the existence of a God” may please some readers, but it risks alienating those who are uncomfortable with breezy comments about religious beliefs. Again, think of your readers and what they value, and weigh the benefits of a clever sentence against its potential to detract from your argument or offend your audience.

You often find colorful wording and irony in op-ed and opinion pieces, where a writer may not have the space to build a compelling argument using evidence and has to resort to shortcuts to readers’ emotions. However, in academic writing, where the careful accumulation and presentation of evidence and telling examples are highly valued, the frequent use of loaded language, exaggeration, and sarcasm is looked on with distrust.

Consider Loewen’s excerpt. Although his outrage comes through clearly, he never resorts to hectoring. For example, in paragraph 1, he writes that students are “ignorant of the workings of the class structure” and that their opinions are “half-formed and naïve.” But he does not imply that students are ignoramuses or that their opinions are foolish. What they lack, he contends, is understanding. They need to be taught something about class structure that they are not now being taught. And paragraph 1 is about as close to name-calling as Loewen comes. Even textbook writers, who are the target of his anger, are not vilified.

Loewen does occasionally make use of irony, for example in paragraph 4, where he points out inconsistencies and omissions in textbooks: “Never mind that the most violent class conflicts in American history — Bacon’s Rebellion and Shays’s Rebellion — took place in and just after colonial times. Textbooks still say that colonial society was relatively classless and marked by upward mobility. And things have only gotten rosier since.” But he doesn’t resort to ridicule. Instead, he relies on examples and illustrations to connect with his readers’ sense of values and appeal to their emotions.

Steps to Appealing to Pathos

1. Show that you know what your readers value. Start from your own values and imagine what assumptions and principles would appeal to your readers. What common ground can you imagine between your values and theirs? How will it need to be adjusted for different kinds of readers?

2. Use illustrations and examples that appeal to readers’ emotions. Again, start from your own emotional position. What examples and illustrations resonate most with you? How can you present them to have the most emotional impact on your readers? How would you adjust them for different kinds of readers?

3. Consider how your tone may affect your audience. Be wary of using loaded, exaggerated, and intemperate language that may put off your readers; and be careful in your use of irony and sarcasm.

A Practice Sequence: Appealing to Ethos and Pathos

Discuss the language and strategies the writers use in the following passages to connect with their audience, in particular their appeals to both ethos and pathos. After reading each excerpt, discuss who you think the implied audience is and whether you think the strategies the writers use to connect with their readers are effective or not.

1. Almost a half century after the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that Southern school segregation was unconstitutional and “inherently unequal,” new statistics from the 1998–99 school year show that segregation continued to intensify throughout the 1990s, a period in which there were three major Supreme Court decisions authorizing a return to segregated neighborhood schools and limiting the reach and duration of desegregation orders. For African American students, this trend is particularly apparent in the South, where most blacks live and where the 2000 Census shows a continuing return from the North. From 1988 to 1998, most of the progress of the previous two decades in increasing integration in the region was lost. The South is still much more integrated than it was before the civil rights revolution, but it is moving backward at an accelerating rate.

— GARY ORFIELD, “Schools More Separate: Consequences of a Decade of Resegregation”

2. When the judgment day comes for every high school student — that day when a final transcript is issued and sent to the finest institutions, with every sin of class selection written as with a burning chisel on stone — on that day a great cry will go up throughout the land, and there will be weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and considerable grumbling against guidance counselors, and the cry of a certain senior might be, “WHY did no one tell me that Introduction to Social Poker wasn’t a solid academic class?” At another, perhaps less wealthy school, a frustrated and under-nurtured sculptress will wonder, “ Why can’t I read, and why don’t I care?” The reason for both of these oversights, as they may eventually discover, is that the idea of the elective course has been seriously mauled, mistreated, and abused under the current middle-class high school system. A significant amount of the blame for producing students who are stunted, both cognitively and morally, can be traced back to this pervasive fact. Elective courses, as shoddily planned and poorly funded as they may be, constitute the only formation that many students get in their own special types of intelligences. Following the model of Howard Gardner, these may be spatial, musical, or something else. A lack of stimulation to a student’s own intelligence directly causes a lack of identification with the intelligence of others. Instead of becoming moderately interested in a subject by noticing the pleasure other people receive from it, the student will be bitter, jealous, and without empathy. These are the common ingredients in many types of tragedy, violent or benign. Schools must take responsibility for speaking in some way to each of the general types of intelligences. Failure to do so will result in students who lack skills, and also the inspiration to comfort, admire, emulate, and aid their fellow humans.

“All tasks that really call upon the power of attention are interesting for the same reason and to an almost equal degree,” wrote Simone Weil in her Reflections on Love and Faith, her editor having defined attention as “a suspension of one’s own self as a center of the world and making oneself available to the reality of another being.” In Parker Palmer’s The Courage to Teach, modern scientific theorist David Bohm describes “a holistic underlying implicate order whose information unfolds into the explicate order of particular fields.” Rilke’s euphemism for this “holistic . . . implicate order,” which Palmer borrows, is “the grace of great things.” Weil’s term would be “God.” However, both agree that eventual perception of this singular grace, or God, is accessible through education of a specific sort, and for both it is doubtless the most necessary experience of a lifetime. Realizing that this contention is raining down from different theorists, and keeping in mind that the most necessary experience of a lifetime should not be wholly irrelevant to the school system, educators should therefore reach the conclusion that this is a matter worth looking into. I assert that the most fruitful and practical results of their attention will be a wider range of electives coupled with a new acknowledgment and handling of them, one that treats each one seriously.

— ERIN MEYERS, “The Educational Smorgasbord as Saving

APPEALING TO LOGOS: USING REASON AND EVIDENCE TO FIT THE SITUATION

To make an argument persuasive, you need to be in dialogue with your readers, using your own character (ethos) to demonstrate that you are a reasonable, credible, and fair person and to appeal to your readers’ emotions (pathos), particularly their sense of right and wrong. Both types of appeal go hand in hand with appeals to logos, using converging pieces of evidence — statistics, facts, observations — to advance your claim. Remember that the type of evidence you use is determined by the issue, problem, situation, and readers’ expectations. As an author, you should try to anticipate and address readers’ beliefs and values. Ethos and pathos are concerned with the content of your argument; logos addresses both form and content.

An argument begins with one or more premises and ends with a conclusion. A premise is an assumption that you expect your readers to agree with, a statement that is either true or false — for example, “Alaska is cold in the winter” — that is offered in support of a claim. That claim is the conclusion you want your readers to draw from your premises. The conclusion is also a sentence that is either true or false.

For instance, Loewen’s major premise is that class is a key factor in Americans’ access to health care, education, and wealth. Loewen also offers a second, more specific premise: that textbook writers provide little discussion of the ways class matters. Loewen crafts his argument to help readers draw the following conclusion: “We live in a class system that runs counter to the democratic principles that underlie the founding of the United States, and history textbooks must tell this story. Without this knowledge, citizens will be uninformed.”

Whether readers accept this as true depends on how Loewen moves from his initial premises to reach his conclusion — that is, whether we draw the same kinds of inferences, or reasoned judgments, that he does. He must do so in a way that meets readers’ expectations of what constitutes relevant and persuasive evidence and guides them one step at a time toward his conclusion.

There are two main forms of argument: deductive and inductive. A deductive argument is an argument in which the premises support (or appear to support) the conclusion. If you join two premises to produce a conclusion that is taken to be true, you are stating a syllogism. This is the classic example of deductive reasoning through a syllogism:

1. All men are mortal. (First premise)

2. Socrates is a man. (Second premise)

3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. (Conclusion)

In a deductive argument, it is impossible for both premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. That is, the truth of the premises means that the conclusion must also be true.

By contrast, an inductive argument relies on evidence and observation to reach a conclusion. Although readers may accept a writer’s premises as true, it is possible for them to reject the writer’s conclusion.

Let’s consider this for a moment in the context of Loewen’s argument. Loewen introduces the premise that class matters, then offers the more specific premise that textbook writers leave class issues out of their narratives of American history, and finally draws the conclusion that citizens need to be informed of this body of knowledge in order to create change:

1. Although class is a key factor in Americans’ access to health care, education, and wealth, students know very little about the social structure in the United States.

2. In their textbooks, textbook writers do not address the issue of class, an issue that people need to know about.

3. Therefore, if people had this knowledge, they would understand that poverty cannot be blamed on the poor.

Notice that Loewen’s premises are not necessarily true. For example, readers could challenge the premise that “textbook writers do not address issues of class.” After all, Loewen examined just eighteen textbooks. What if he had examined a different set of textbooks? Would he have drawn the same conclusion? And even if Loewen’s evidence convinces us that the two premises are true, we do not have to accept that the conclusion is true.

The conclusion in an inductive argument is never definitive. That is the nature of any argument that deals with human emotions and actions. Moreover, we have seen throughout history that people tend to disagree much more on the terms of an argument than on its form. Do we agree that Israel’s leaders practice apartheid? (What do we mean by apartheid in this case?) Do we agree with the need to grant women reproductive rights? (When does life begin?) Do we agree that all people should be treated equally? (Would equality mean equal access to resources or to outcomes?)

Deductive arguments are conclusive. In a deductive argument, the premises are universal truths — laws of nature, if you will — and the conclusion must follow from those premises. That is, a2 plus b2 always equals c2, and humans are always mortal.

By contrast, an inductive argument is never conclusive. The premises may or may not be true; and even if they are true, the conclusion may be false. We might accept that class matters and that high school history textbooks don’t address the issue of class structure in the United States; but we still would not know that students who have studied social stratification in America will necessarily understand the nature of poverty. It may be that social class is only one reason for poverty; or it may be that textbooks are only one source of information about social stratification in the United States, that textbook omissions are simply not as serious as Loewen claims. That the premises of an argument are true establishes only that the conclusion is probably true and, perhaps, true only for some readers.

Inductive argument is the basis of academic writing; it is also the basis of any appeal to logos. The process of constructing an inductive argument involves three steps:

1. State the premises of your argument.

2. Use credible evidence to show readers that your argument has merit.

3. Demonstrate that the conclusion follows from the premises.

In following these three steps, you will want to determine the truth of your premises, help readers understand whether or not the inferences you draw are justified, and use word signals to help readers fully grasp the connections between your premises and your conclusion.

◼ State the Premises of Your Argument

Stating a premise establishes what you have found to be true and what you want to persuade readers to accept as truth as well. Let’s return to Loewen, who asserts his premise at the very outset of the excerpt: “Middle-class students . . . know little about how the American class structure works . . . and nothing at all about how it has changed over time.” Loewen elaborates on this initial premise a few sentences later, arguing that students “have no understanding of the ways that opportunity is not equal in America and no notion that the social structure pushes people around, influencing the ideas they hold and the lives they fashion.”

Implicit here is the point that class matters. Loewen makes this point explicit several paragraphs later, where he states that “social class is probably the single most important variable in society” (para. 6). He states his second, more specific premise in paragraph 2: “High school history textbooks can take some of the credit for this state of affairs.” The burden of demonstrating that these premises are true is on Loewen. If readers find that either of the premises is not true, it will be difficult, if not impossible, for them to accept his conclusion that with more knowledge, people will understand that poverty is not the fault of the poor (para. 10).

◼ Use Credible Evidence

The validity of your argument depends on whether the inferences you draw are justified, and whether you can expect a reasonable person to draw the same conclusion from those premises. Loewen has to demonstrate throughout (1) that students do not have much, if any, knowledge about the class structure that exists in the United States and (2) that textbook writers are in large part to blame for this lack of knowledge. He also must help readers understand how this lack of knowledge contributes to (3) his conclusion that greater knowledge would lead Americans to understand that poor people are not responsible for poverty. He can help readers with the order in which he states his premises and by choosing the type and amount of evidence that will enable readers to draw the inferences that he does.

Interestingly, Loewen seems to assume that one group of readers — educators — will accept his first premise as true. He does not elaborate on what students know or do not know. Instead, he moves right to his second premise, which involves first acknowledging what high school history textbooks typically cover, then identifying what he believes are the important events that textbook writers exclude, and ultimately asserting that textbook discussions of events in labor history are never “anchored in any analysis of social class” (para. 3). He supports this point with his own study of eighteen textbooks (paras. 3–5) before returning to his premise that “social class is probably the single most important variable in society” (para. 6). What follows is a series of observations about the rich and references to researchers’ findings on inequality (paras. 7–9). Finally, he asserts that “social class determines how people think about social class” (para. 10), implying that fuller knowledge would lead business leaders and conservative voters to think differently about the source of poverty. The question to explore is whether or not Loewen supports this conclusion.

◼ Demonstrate That the Conclusion Follows from the Premises

Authors signal their conclusion with words like consequently, finally, in sum, in the end, subsequently, therefore, thus, ultimately, and as a result. Here is how this looks in the structure of Loewen’s argument:

1. Although class is a key factor in Americans’ access to health care, education, and wealth, students know very little about the social structure in the United States.

2. In their textbooks, textbook writers do not address the issue of class, an issue that people need to know about.

3. Ultimately, if people had this knowledge, they would understand that poverty cannot be blamed on the poor.

We’ve reprinted much of paragraph 9 of Loewen’s excerpt below. Notice how Loewen pulls together what he has been discussing. He again underscores the importance of class and achievement (“All these are among the reasons”). And he points out that access to certain types of colleges puts people in a position to accumulate and sustain wealth. Of course, this is not true of the poor “because affluent families can save some money while poor families must spend what they make.” This causal relationship (“Because”) heightens readers’ awareness of the class structure that exists in the United States.

All these are among the reasons that social class predicts the rate of college attendance and the type of college chosen more effectively than does any other factor, including intellectual ability, however measured. After college, most affluent children get white-collar jobs, most working-class children get blue-collar jobs, and the class differences continue. As adults, rich people are more likely to have hired an attorney and to be a member of formal organizations that increase their civic power. Poor people are more likely to watch TV. Because affluent families can save some money while poor families must spend what they make, wealth differences are ten times larger than income differences. Therefore most poor and working-class families cannot accumulate the down payment required to buy a house, which in turn shuts them out from our most important tax shelter, the write-off of home mortgage interest. Working-class parents cannot afford to live in elite subdivisions or hire high-quality day care, so the process of educational inequality replicates itself in the next generation. Finally, affluent Americans also have longer life expectancies than lower- and working-class people, the largest single cause of which is better access to health care. . . .

Once Loewen establishes this causal relationship, he concludes (“Therefore,” “Finally”) with the argument that poverty persists from one generation to the next.

In paragraph 10, Loewen uses the transition word ultimately to make the point that social class matters, so much so that it limits the ways in which people see the world, that it even “determines how people think about social class.” (We discuss how to write conclusions in Chapter 11.)

Steps to Appealing to Logos

1. State the premises of your argument. Establish what you have found to be true and what you want readers to accept as well.

2. Use credible evidence. Lead your readers from one premise to the next, making sure your evidence is sufficient and convincing and your inferences are logical and correct.

3. Demonstrate that the conclusion follows from the premises. In particular, use the right words to signal to your readers how the evidence and inferences lead to your conclusion.

RECOGNIZING LOGICAL FALLACIES

We turn now to logical fallacies, flaws in the chain of reasoning that lead to a conclusion that does not necessarily follow from the premises, or evidence. Logical fallacies are common in inductive arguments for two reasons: Inductive arguments rely on reasoning about probability, not certainty; and they derive from human beliefs and values, not facts or laws of nature.

Here we list fifteen logical fallacies. In examining them, think about how to guard against the sometimes-faulty logic behind statements you might hear from politicians, advertisers, and the like. That should help you examine the premises on which you base your own assumptions and the logic you use to help readers reach the same conclusions you do.

1. Erroneous Appeal to Authority. An authority is someone with expertise in a given subject. An erroneous authority is an author who claims to be an authority but is not, or someone an author cites as an authority who is not. In this type of fallacy, the claim might be true, but the fact that an unqualified person is making the claim means there is no reason for readers to accept the claim as true.

Because the issue here is the legitimacy of authority, your concern should be to prove to yourself and your readers that you or the people you are citing have expertise in the subject. An awareness of this type of fallacy has become increasingly important as celebrities offer support for candidates running for office or act as spokespeople for curbing global warming or some other cause. The candidate may be the best person for the office, and there may be very good reasons to control global warming; but we need to question the legitimacy of a nonexpert endorsement.

2. Ad Hominem. An ad hominem argument focuses on the person making a claim instead of on the claim itself. (Ad hominem is Latin for “to the person.”) In most cases, an ad hominem argument does not have a bearing on the truth or the quality of a claim.

Keep in mind that it is always important to address the claim or the reasoning behind it, rather than the person making the claim. “Of course Senator Wiley supports oil drilling in Alaska — he’s in the pocket of the oil companies!” is an example of an ad hominem argument. Senator Wiley may have good reasons for supporting oil drilling in Alaska that have nothing to do with his alleged attachment to the oil industry. However, if an individual’s character is relevant to the argument, then an ad hominem argument can be valid. If Senator Wiley has been found guilty of accepting bribes from an oil company, it makes sense to question both his credibility and his claims.

3. Shifting the Issue. This type of fallacy occurs when an author draws attention away from the issue instead of offering evidence that will enable people to draw their own conclusions about the soundness of an argument. Consider this example:

Affirmative action proponents accuse me of opposing equal opportunity in the workforce. I think my positions on military expenditures, education, and public health speak for themselves.

The author of this statement does not provide a chain of reasoning that would enable readers to judge his or her stance on the issue of affirmative action.

4. Either/Or Fallacy. At times, an author will take two extreme positions to force readers to make a choice between two seemingly contradictory positions. For example:

Either you support the war, or you are against it.

Although the author has set up an either/or condition, in reality one position does not exclude the other. People can support the troops involved in a war, for example, even if they don’t support the reasons for starting the war.

5. Sweeping Generalizations. When an author attempts to draw a conclusion without providing sufficient evidence to support the conclusion or examining possible counterarguments, he or she may be making sweeping generalizations. Consider this example:

Despite the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, women still do not receive equal pay for equal work. Obviously, any attempt to change the status quo for women is doomed to failure.

As is the case with many fallacies, the author’s position may be reasonable, but we cannot accept the argument at face value. Reading critically entails testing assumptions like this one — that any attempt to create change is doomed to failure because women do not receive equal pay for equal work. We could ask, for example, whether inequities persist in the public sector. And we could point to other areas where the women’s movement has had measurable success. Title IX, for example, has reduced the dropout rate among teenage girls; it has also increased the rate at which women earn college and graduate degrees.

6. Bandwagon. When an author urges readers to accept an idea because a significant number of people support it, he or she is making a bandwagon argument. This is a fairly common mode of argument in advertising; for example, a commercial might attempt to persuade us to buy a certain product because it’s popular.

Because Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley have all added a multicultural component to their graduation requirements, other institutions should do so as well.

The growing popularity of an idea is not sufficient reason to accept that it is valid.

7. Begging the Question. This fallacy entails advancing a circular argument that asks readers to accept a premise that is also the conclusion readers are expected to draw:

We could improve the undergraduate experience with coed dorms because both men and women benefit from living with members of the opposite gender.

Here readers are being asked to accept that the conclusion is true despite the fact that the premises — men benefit from living with women, and women benefit from living with men — are essentially the same as the conclusion. Without evidence that a shift in dorm policy could improve on the undergraduate experience, we cannot accept the conclusion as true. Indeed, the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise.

8. False Analogy. Authors (and others) often try to persuade us that something is true by using a comparison. This approach is not in and of itself a problem, as long as the comparison is reasonable. For example:

It is ridiculous to have a Gay and Lesbian Program and a Department of African American Culture. We don’t have a Straight Studies Program or a Department of Caucasian Culture.

Here the author is urging readers to rethink the need for two academic departments by saying that the school doesn’t have two other departments. That, of course, is not a reason for or against the new departments. What’s needed is an analysis that compares the costs (economic and otherwise) of starting up and operating the new departments versus the contributions (economic and otherwise) of the new departments.

9. Technical Jargon. If you’ve ever had a salesperson try to persuade you to purchase a television or an entertainment system with capabilities you absolutely must have — even if you didn’t understand a word the salesperson was saying about alternating currents and circuit splicers — then you’re familiar with this type of fallacy. We found this passage in a student’s paper:

You should use this drug because it has been clinically proven that it inhibits the reuptake of serotonin and enhances the dopamine levels of the body’s neurotransmitters.

The student’s argument may very well be true, but he hasn’t presented any substantive evidence to demonstrate that the premises are true and that the conclusion follows from the premises.

10. Confusing Cause and Effect. It is challenging to establish that one factor causes another. For example, how can we know for certain that economic class predicts, or is a factor in, academic achievement? How do we know that a new president’s policies are the cause of a country’s economic well-being? Authors often assume cause and effect when two factors are simply associated with each other:

The current recession came right after the president was elected.

This fallacy states a fact, but it does not prove that the president’s election caused the recession.

11. Appeal to Fear. One type of logical fallacy makes an appeal to readers’ irrational fears and prejudices, preventing them from dealing squarely with a given issue and often confusing cause and effect:

We should use whatever means possible to avoid further attack.

The reasoning here is something like this: “If we are soft on defense, we will never end the threat of terrorism.” But we need to consider whether there is indeed a threat, and, if so, whether the presence of a threat should lead to action, and, if so, whether that action should include “whatever means possible.” (Think of companies that sell alarm systems by pointing to people’s vulnerability to harm and property damage.)

12. Fallacy of Division. A fallacy of division suggests that what is true of the whole must also be true of its parts:

Conservatives have always voted against raising the minimum wage, against stem cell research, and for defense spending. Therefore, we can assume that conservative Senator Harrison will vote this way.

The author is urging readers to accept the premise without providing evidence of how the senator has actually voted on the three issues.

13. Hasty Generalization. This fallacy is committed when a person draws a conclusion about a group based on a sample that is too small to be representative. Consider this statement:

Seventy-five percent of the seniors surveyed at the university study just 10 hours a week. We can conclude, then, that students at the university are not studying enough.

What you need to know is how many students were actually surveyed. Seventy-five percent may seem high, but not if the researcher surveyed just 400 of the 2,400 graduating seniors. This sample of students from a total population of 9,600 students at the university is too small to draw the conclusion that students in general are not studying enough.

14. The Straw Man Argument. A straw man fallacy makes a generalization about what a group believes without actually citing a specific writer or work:

Democrats are more interested in running away than in trying to win the war on terrorism.

Here the fallacy is that the author simply ignores someone’s actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated, or misrepresented version of that position. This kind of fallacy often goes hand in hand with assuming that what is true of the group is true of the individual, what we call the fallacy of division.

15. Fallacy of the Middle Ground. The fallacy of the middle ground assumes that the middle position between two extreme positions must be correct. Although the middle ground may be true, the author must justify this position with evidence.

E. D. Hirsch argues that cultural literacy is the only sure way to increase test scores, and Jonathan Kozol believes schools will improve only if state legislators increase funding; but I would argue that school reform will occur if we change the curriculum and provide more funding.

This fallacy draws its power from the fact that a moderate or middle position is often the correct one. Again, however, the claim that the moderate or middle position is correct must be supported by legitimate reasoning.

ANALYZING THE APPEALS IN A RESEARCHED ARGUMENT

Now that you have studied the variety of appeals you can make to connect with your audience, we would like you to read an article on urban health problems by Meredith Minkler and analyze her strategies for appealing to her readers. The article is long and carefully argued, so we suggest you take detailed notes about her use of appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos as you read. You may want to refer to the Practice Sequence questions on page 286 to help focus your reading. Ideally, you should work through the text with your classmates, in groups of three or four, appointing one student to record and share each group’s analysis of Minkler’s argument.

MEREDITH MINKLER

Community-Based Research Partnerships: Challenges and Opportunities

Meredith Minkler is a professor of health and social behavior at the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. She is an activist and researcher whose work explores community partnerships, community organizing, and community-based participatory research. With more than one hundred books and articles to her credit, she is coeditor of the influential Community Based Participatory Research for Health (2003). The following article appeared in The Journal of Urban Health in 2005.

Abstract

The complexity of many urban health problems often makes them ill suited to traditional research approaches and interventions. The resultant frustration, together with community calls for genuine partnership in the research process, has highlighted the importance of an alternative paradigm. Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is presented as a promising collaborative approach that combines systematic inquiry, participation, and action to address urban health problems. Following a brief review of its basic tenets and historical roots, key ways in which CBPR adds value to urban health research are introduced and illustrated. Case study examples from diverse international settings are used to illustrate some of the difficult ethical challenges that may arise in the course of CBPR partnership approaches. The concepts of partnership synergy and cultural humility, together with protocols such as Green et al.’s guidelines for appraising CBPR projects, are highlighted as useful tools for urban health researchers seeking to apply this collaborative approach and to deal effectively with the difficult ethical challenges it can present.

Keywords

Community-based participatory research, Ethical issues in research, Participatory action research, Partnership, Urban health.

Introduction

The complexity of urban health problems has often made them poorly suited to traditional “outside expert”– driven research and intervention approaches.1 Together with community demands for authentic partnerships in research that are locally relevant and “community based” rather than merely “community placed,” this frustration has led to a burgeoning of interest in an alternative research paradigm.1,2 Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is an overarching term that increasingly is used to encompass a variety of approaches to research that have as their centerpiece three interrelated elements: participation, research, and action.3 As defined by Green et al.4 for the Royal Society of Canada, CBPR may concisely be described as “systematic investigation with the participation of those affected by an issue for purposes of education and action or affecting social change.” The approach further has been characterized as

[A] collaborative process that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community with the aim of combining knowledge and action for social change to improve community health and eliminate health disparities.5,6

This article briefly describes CBPR’s roots and core principles and summarizes the value added by this approach to urban health research. Drawing on examples from a variety of urban health settings nationally and internationally, it discusses and illustrates several of the key challenges faced in applying this partnership approach to inquiry and action. The article concludes by suggesting that despite such challenges and the labor-intensive nature of this approach, CBPR offers an exceptional opportunity for partnering with communities in ways that can enhance both the quality of research and its potential for helping address some of our most intractable urban health problems.