The Pathos Assignment   (15%)

Purpose

This assignment will help develop reading comprehension and analysing skills.

 

Instructions

Read and analyse the assigned article. Your pathos analysis can look at how the author uses loaded language or by relating an anecdote or illustration. You are to write approximately 500 words. This will need to provide a thesis—is the use of pathos in this article strong or weak?

Please read the article “Why Twitter Wants You to Hate” by Michael Coren (2019) and compose a complete, properly formatted and organised critique of the author’s arguments. For this assignment, you are going to analyse the author’s use of Pathos only. This means you are going to identify the emotional appeals, the author’s tone, specific words and examples/anecdotes he uses in the attempt to persuade the readers of his opinion through emotion.

Preparation:

Please read all of the content found in Module 5 under learning materials in Blackboard. When you read through the entire chapter on Analysing Pathos in Module 5, please pay close attention to the link: Organisational Tips for Analysing Tone. This page is a student paragraph that you can use for inspiration when drafting your assignment. This paragraph will demonstrate how to reference evidence from the article and organize your evaluations. Also, please review The Rhetorical Appeals link found in the same Module. You will also benefit from completing the Pathos exercises.

For your analysis on Pathos, please pay close attention to the examples and specific words the author uses in the article. How do these words and examples evoke emotion from you, the reader? Do you find that the examples and words are enough to persuade you of the main idea?

Please organise your analysis in the following way:

1) Provide a main idea sentence in APA format (do you remember how to do this? Review how to construct a main idea sentence from the Module on Summary Writing).  
2) Compose a statement of how the author appeals to emotion (words, examples, anecdotes, descriptions, etc.).
3) Provide three examples of the author’s appeals with your evaluation of how they are persuasive. Here, you will identify a word or example in quotations, then you’re going to critique it for its persuasive merit.
4) Write a concluding statement of whether or not you found the article persuasive overall based on the Pathos strategies the author employed. If you found it persuasive, explain why. If you didn’t find it persuasive, please explain why and what the author could do to improve his/her argument.

• Word count: approximately 500 words, .docx format (MS Word)
• Please provide your name
• PLEASE READ THE CONTENT OF MODULE 5 VERY CAREFULLY

 

Evaluation

 

A successful analysis will:

• Outline how the author makes his/her argument
• Evaluate the argument in terms of pathos (loaded language or anecdote).
• Cite specific passages and demonstrates how they function within the overall argument
• Identify any significant strengths or weaknesses of the argument (or a mixture of both) and ties them back to the claims of the argument (evaluation)

Rubric

Your assignment shall be evaluated by using the following criteria:

Formatting – 5%
• The Word count is mentioned on the assignment (350 words)
• There are quotations around words and phrases from the text with paragraph references
• The student uses proper paragraph formatting with indentation (1 paragraph only)
• The main idea sentence is in APA format
• Make sure your assignment has a title

Content – 10%
• There are three examples of tone and emotional appeals in total.
• There is an evaluation of the persuasive merit of each example you provide.
• Your main idea sentence is an accurate paraphrase of what the main idea/thesis of the article is.
• There is an explanation of whether or not the tone, language, and emotional appeals the author makes strengthen or weaken the author’s argument.
• The concluding statement describes whether the article is persuasive or not with an explanation. The student should suggest improvements that would make the article more persuasive.

 

Formatting

Your summary must be double-spaced with 1” margins on all sides and in a 12 point (Times New Roman or similar) font.Use proper APA formatting (title page, reference page). 

 

Due Date

The Week of October 18th, the night before your class @ 11:59pm