• Memory Key: Pathos == pathetic (a kind of emotion).

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• Pathos is not the rhetor/author telling people how they feel, but rather arousing emotion in the audience - making them feel a certain way in order to put them in a state of mind that's ready to accept what you're trying to convince them of.

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• When analyzing a piece of writing using Pathos as an appeal, use your emotional vocabulary - name the emotions as you analyze the evidence of pathos.

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• Example: 

  • When I was a young boy, my sister got pregnant. She was afraid to tell my mother or anyone. She and a friend of hers went to a quack doctor and got some pills to abort the baby. She's been dead now for 15 years. Birth-control pills and morning-after pills are medicines that should be available​ over the counter.

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• In this example, the author is probably hoping to inspire a variety of emotions. The first might probably to inspire sadness in the audience as a whole. The author doesn't tell the audience to feel sadness, but rather attempts to evoke the emotion. In the audience, might be people who feel a different way than the author does about birth-control pills and morning-after pills, in this respect, the author might be attempting to evoke some guilt. The conclusion to the story is perhaps meant to shock the audience as a whole. The conclusion to the passage (that birth control and morning-after pills be readily available) might perhaps now seem like a reasonable thing for the audience to believe. The emotional appeal sets the stage for the audience to have the state of might that is malleable to the author's point of view and plea.