1)Authority or ethos is the amount of confidence or hope the listener has toward the arguer. Emotion or pathos is the exercise in which the arguer presents a sentimental side to the argument in an attempt to touch the soft side of the audience. Logic or logos is the skill of connecting the ideas presented in your argument.
2)A good strategy is to offer opposite mentalities and discredit them with argumentative points to strengthen your argument. Also, after you have done research you more easily sound confident. A way to sound of confident would be not to use phrases like “I think” or “In my opinion”. It is advantageous for you to be a seen as an authority to reader because the reader is more likely to accept and accept your claims.
3)A good strategy for appealing to emotion would be to use ample amount of imagery in your writing to allow the audience to connect within themselves. Another good strategy is to tell an audience a story of an emotional personal experience and use that as support for a claim. A hypothetical situation could be showing images of animal cruelty to support an argument in favor of animal rights.
4)Yes there are potential disadvantages with using heavy appeal of emotion because something the emotion can be so strong that people miss that point of the argument. Also, emotion can be so graphic that people can be shocked enough to miss the point. An example could be showing graphic images of dead animals and shocking the audience enough to distract them from your point.
5)A way you can build a strong argument using logos would be to connect your claim to support and supporting your support with evidence such as examples in history or personal experience. It is very important to use logos for a reasonable argument because your audience wouldn’t view your opinion as a valued opinion, and without that you don’t have an audience.
6)I think that ethos, logos, and pathos are interconnected and interdependent on each other in an argument. Lobbyists and politicians conduct a great deal of research for their argument to create and authority, attempt to create emotional imagery to help their cause or actions, and use multiple kinds of detailed support.
Analysis of Environmentalism as Religion Run Amok by Michael Crichton
Michael Crichton uses all three persuasive appeals in his argumentative essay on the subject of environmentalism. I noticed that he established a sense of authority because he engaged in plenty of research. He presents research on the bible and regional history from the Maori of New Zealand to the Sioux of the Americas. His research gives the reader a sense of confidence; a major part of ethos. Michael Crichton presents emotions in the disagreement of nature being similar to the Garden of Eden, but he seems not to use emotion enough in some areas. He sets up the imagery of nature being a hard and tough place to survive with the mentioning of plague, war, and high mortality rates. He also uses emotion when he mentions that DDT never caused birds to die and that the ban caused millions of people to die to a callous. He creates an image of people dying in response to an unjustly ban. Michael Crichton uses logos to connect his ideas through a relationship of support. He establishes his idea of environmentalism being politicized and connects this idea with the support of the evidence he presents. He presents evidence of past occurrences in history, the ban of DDT, and the bible. Finally, my evaluation of the essay is that Michael Crichton uses a good amount of research to support his claim, and is able to connect his ideas to make his claim seem sound and logic. However, he has many more opportunities to reveal emotion from his writing. He could go more in depth into the situations that could possibly bring emotion. Although he could add more emotion, his persuasive essay convinced me that environmentalism is a religion run amok.