Aristotle categorized argumentative appeals into three types: logical appeals that involve factual information and evidence (logos), emotional appeals that speak to our hearts and values (known to the ancient Greeks as pathos), and ethical appeals that appeal to character (ethos).

Logical appeals are often viewed as especially trustworthy: “The facts don’t lie,” some say. Of course, facts are not the only type of logical appeals, which also include firsthand evidence drawn from observations, interviews, surveys and questionnaires, experiments, and personal experience; and secondhand evidence drawn from authorities, the testimony of others, statistics, and other print and online sources. Critical readers need to examine logical appeals just as carefully as emotional and ethical ones. What is the source of the logical appeal, and is that source trustworthy? Are all terms defined clearly? Has the logical evidence presented been taken out of context, and, if so, does that change the meaning of the data?

Sample: A logical appeal

Read the following brief passage and think about its use of logical appeals.

[I]t is well for us to remember that, in an age of increasing illiteracy, 60 percent of the world’s illiterates are women. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of illiterate men in the world rose by 8 million, while the number of illiterate women rose by 40 million.¹ And the number of illiterate women is increasing.

—ADRIENNE RICH, “What Does a Woman Need to Know?”

As a critical reader, you would question these facts and hence check the footnote to discover the source, which in this case is the United Nations Compendium of Social Statistics. At this point, you might accept this document as authoritative—or you might look further into the United Nations’ publications policy, especially to find out how that body defines illiteracy. You would also no doubt wonder why Rich chose the decade from 1960 to 1970 for her example and, as a result, check to see when this essay was written. As it turns out, the essay was written in 1979, so the most recent data available on literacy would have come from the decade of the sixties. That fact might make you question the timeliness of these statistics: Are they still meaningful fifty years later? How might these statistics have changed?

If you attend closely to the emotional, ethical, and logical appeals in any argument, you will be on your way to analyzing—and evaluating—it.

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For Multilingual Writers: Recognizing Appeals in Various Settings