Final answer:
Pathos uses emotional language to persuade an audience by appealing to their feelings. This rhetorical device works by connecting with a range of emotions to support the speaker's or writer's position with the goal of persuasion.
Step-by-step explanation:
Pathos uses emotional language to cause an audience to feel a certain way to persuade them. When you appeal to your audience's feelings, such as sympathy, anger, fear, insecurity, guilt, and conscience, you are supporting your position and attempting to persuade the audience to adopt your standpoint or take some action. The overall purpose of using pathos in writing or speech is to persuade the audience. This is achieved by evoking emotions that resonate with them, which can include a range of feelings from fear to pity, depending on the context and the aim of the speaker or writer.
To effectively use pathos, a speaker might use various rhetorical devices that reflect not just pathos but also ethos, which appeals to ethics and credibility, and logos, which appeals to logic and reason. These rhetorical devices enable the creation of compositions that are responsive to the audience's context and emotions. For instance, in making an argument for the need for more capital police, you might invoke a sense of patriotism, refer to historical events, or share personal anecdotes that elicit strong emotions in your audience.