Appeal to Your Readers

As you work on your draft, consider the strategies you’ll use to convince or persuade your readers to accept your argument. These strategies are essentially a means of appealing to — or asking — your readers to consider the reasons you are offering to support your overall claim and, if they accept them as appropriate and valid, to believe or act in a certain way.

Fortunately, you won’t have to invent strategies on your own. For thousands of years, writers and speakers have used a wide range of appeals to ask readers to accept their reasons as appropriate and valid. Much of the work of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero revolved around strategies for presenting an argument to an audience. Their work still serves as a foundation for how we think about argumentation.

You can ask readers to accept your reasons by appealing to authority; emotion; principles, values, and beliefs; character; or logic. Most arguments are built on a combination of these appeals. The combination you choose will reflect your issue, purpose, readers, sources, and context.

Appeals to authority. When you present a reason by making an appeal to authority, you ask readers to accept it because someone in a position of authority endorses it. The evidence used to support this kind of appeal typically takes the form of quotations, paraphrases, or summaries of the ideas of experts in a given subject area, of political leaders, or of people who have been affected by an issue. As you consider whether this kind of appeal might be appropriate for your argumentative essay, reflect on the notes you’ve taken on your sources. Have you identified experts, leaders, or people who have been affected by an issue? If so, can you use them to convince your readers that your argument has merit?

Appeals to emotion. attempt to elicit an emotional response to an issue. The famous “win one for the Gipper” speech delivered by Pat O’Brien, who portrayed Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne in the 1940 film Knute Rockne: All American, is an example of an appeal to emotion. At halftime during a game with Army, with Notre Dame trailing, he said:

Well, boys . . . I haven’t a thing to say. Played a great game . . . all of you. Great game. I guess we just can’t expect to win ’em all.

I’m going to tell you something I’ve kept to myself for years. None of you ever knew George Gipp. It was long before your time. But you know what a tradition he is at Notre Dame. . . . And the last thing he said to me — “Rock,” he said, “sometime, when the team is up against it — and the breaks are beating the boys — tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper. . . . I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock,” he said — “but I’ll know about it — and I’ll be happy.”

Using emotional appeals to frame an argument — that is, to help readers view an issue in a particular way — is a tried-and-true strategy. But use it carefully, if you use it at all. In some types of documents, such as scholarly articles and essays, emotional appeals are used infrequently, and readers of such documents are likely to ask why you would play on their emotions instead of making an appeal to logic or an appeal to authority.

Appeals to principles, values, and beliefs. rely on the assumption that your readers value a given set of principles. Religious and ethical arguments are often based on appeals to principles, such as the need to respect God, to love one another, to trust in the innate goodness of people, to believe that all of us are created equal, or to believe that security should never be purchased at the price of individual liberty. If you make an appeal to principles, values, or beliefs, be sure your readers share the particular principle, value, or belief you are using. If they don’t, you might need to state and justify your underlying assumptions at the outset — or you might want to try a different kind of appeal.

Appeals to character. Writers frequently use appeals to character. When politicians refer to their military experience, for example, they are saying, “Look at me. I’m a patriotic person who has served our country.” When celebrities endorse a product, they are saying, “You know and like me, so please believe me when I say that this product is worth purchasing.” Appeals to character can also reflect a person’s professional accomplishment. When scientists or philosophers present an argument, for example, they sometimes refer to their background and experience, or perhaps to their previous publications. In doing so, they are implicitly telling their readers that they have been accurate and truthful in the past and that readers can continue to trust them. Essentially, you can think of an appeal to character as the “trust me” strategy. As you consider this kind of appeal, reflect on your character, accomplishments, and experiences, and ask how they might lead your readers to trust you.

Appeals to logic. A logical appeal refers to the concept of reasoning through a set of propositions to reach a considered conclusion. For example, you might argue that a suspect is guilty of murder because police found her fingerprints on the murder weapon, her blood under the murder victim’s fingernails, scratches on the suspect’s face, and video of the murder from a surveillance camera. Your argument would rely on the logical presentation of evidence to convince jurors that the suspect was the murderer and to persuade them to return a verdict of guilty. As you develop reasons to support your claim, consider using logical appeals such as deduction and induction.

Proposition 1 (usually a general principle): Stealing is wrong.

Proposition 2 (usually an observation): John stole a candy bar from the store.

Conclusion (results of deductive analysis): John’s theft of the candy bar was wrong.

Deduction is often used to present arguments that have ethical and moral dimensions, such as birth control, welfare reform, and immigration policy.

You can use different types of appeals to support your claim. Emotional appeals can be mixed with appeals to character. A coach’s address to a team before an important athletic competition often relies not only on appeals to emotion but also on appeals to character, asking the players to trust what the coach has to say and to trust in themselves and their own abilities. Similarly, appeals to principle can be combined with appeals to emotion and logic.

To choose your appeals, reflect on your purpose, readers, sources, context, and overall claim. In your writer’s notebook, record your responses to the following:

  1. Put your overall claim in the form of a thesis statement.
  2. List the reasons you will offer to accept your overall claim.
  3. Identify the evidence you will use to accept each reason.
  4. Ask what sort of appeals will help you connect each reason to the evidence you have chosen.
  5. Sketch out promising appeals. Ask, for example, how you would appeal to authority, or how you would appeal to logic.
  6. Ask how your readers are likely to respond to a given appeal.
  7. Ask whether each appeal is appropriate in light of your overall argument. An emotional appeal might seem effective by itself, for example, but if the argument you’ve developed relies largely on appeals to logic and authority, an emotional appeal might surprise your readers.