In Class; Understanding Pathos

Understanding an appeal to emotion will be helpful in writing our essay about a public space. For example, in a Starbucks, the advertisements throughout the coffee shop are encouraging people to take an action. In order to convince the patron to perform this action, such as drink a cup of coffee, the company uses emotional appeals. They assume that when you see the word fair you will automatically assume that fair trade coffee must be better than regular simply because the word evokes a positive emotion. They also play music that makes you happy, thus convincing you that drinking their coffee will make you happy. It will be helpful to recognize these emotional appeals when writing our essay because it will help me to better understand the argument that the public space is making.