Pathos Is Not A Dirty Word, And It Belongs In A Writerâs Vocabulary. Pathos is down on its luck these days; appeals to emotion are bound up in reasonable fears of âpost-truthâ and âpopulistâ writing, but Iâm here to tell you that intelligent use of pathos can make your fiction better.
Sometimes a person thinks they are offering an argument when they are only providing assertions. Perhaps the simplest explanation of what an argument is comes from Monty Pythons Argument Clinic sketch: 1  An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition.
Debate, without rebuttals, would merely be a series of speeches with no relation to each other. Like ships passing in the night, there will be no clash, no conflict and ultimately, no debate. Rebuttal, like argumentation, is one of the foundations of debate. What is rebuttal then? It is a speaker saying that an opponent's argument is not valid and showing why it is not valid. If argument is about building logic links in a case, then rebuttal is about the breaking of these links.