Week 12: My Persuasive Appeals

In my community post I ended up using ethos, pathos, and logos in order to really support my stance.  My post was about the power of words and how they are deeply influential in every single persons life.  My strategy was to start with ethos in order to make sure the reader understood that I was an authority figure on this topic because of my person experiences.  I gave examples of how influential words have been in my life and how much they have affected me as a person.  This was done in a hope to make the reader aware of my experience on the topics so they would trust what I had to say.  

Following this I approached pathos in order to have the reader draw from their own experiences to give them a deeper connection to my argument.  There are many people that would say words don't affect them and they just don't listen to other people.  They are unaware of how much they are influenced because they are too confident in their ability to rise above it.  However, words don't work that way and we have all had an experience or too when words really did affect us on a deeper level.  

I actually ended my post with logos because I thought now that the reader trust my authority and they are pulled from their own emotions they could now except factual information from science that supported my point.  I chose a stance from a respected professor on phycology who underlined the important role words play on an emotional level for human beings.  

I really think that a blog should use all three ethos, pathos, and logos in their approach to persuasion because each element layers on top of each other to create a strong argument.  Asserting the writer as an authority from the beginning is one of the more important aspects to writing a blog because the reader needs to trust the writer before listening to what they have to say.  Then, with fact and emotional connection the writer can connect to the reader on a deeper level that will insight power through their argument.  With those three elements the words of the writer will have the strongest affect on the reader proving my original point that, "words have power".