Ethos, Logos, and Pathos: Academic Writers
Thomas Fox
The Greeks talk about it. I mean there's…somebody can string together some logic that makes sense to me and say, "here's the reasoning behind my opinion. This is why this is better than this." And give me evidence. And that's called logos. And then other times, when somebody I really, really respect has an opinion that's different from me, I rethink my position. That's called ethos. Pathos is when you have a feeling and I'm resistant to persuasion by pathos, that's my least favorite. But if someone makes an appeal and tries to get me to feel something so that I believe something that's the other way, but in the end most people combine these approaches.

Duff Brenna
What is the mood that you want to create? And mood and tone are really pretty much the same thing as we're talking about here, you know. How serious…or do you want to go at it in a way in which you can bring out some humor in the essay? That's tone as well. How are you going to keep that accurate? There are ways of doing it in which you just pile up details, you pile up facts, you pile up statistics, you know. Certain percentage of people that smoke, they get cancer. Your tone is very academically oriented, sort of scientific tone. You don't wanna break that if that's what you, if that's the…you don't wanna all of a sudden write something that's very humorous in the middle of an essay that's got this scientific tone in it, right?

Robb Lightfoot
Emotions are a part of argument and they're a legitimate part of an argument. It's that they can't overshadow the fact that you must have some substance, which is evidence. I council students to realize that, you know, Aristotle talked about the credibility of the speaker, the emotions of the audience and the actual substance of speech. And those are still the things we look for…thousands of years hasn't dulled that truth. We know a lot more about human nature. And it's a real problem sometimes in terms of being ethical and yet still wanting to arouse people emotionally. There has to be a balance. You can't divorce emotions from argument, and you shouldn't. But if you step back and the next day you look at the argument, especially if it's on paper and you have notes, and there's not much more than the whipping up of your emotions then it's not worthy of adherence, of holding to it.

Steven Browning
If I were writing to my opponent, I would not begin by eviscerating his or her views. I would begin by stating common ground, and establishing some kind of shared knowledge, shared values, upon which you could build an argument.