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.
Given the way the terms âdeductive argumentâ and âinductive argumentâ are defined here, an argument is always one or the other and never both, but in deciding which one of the two it is, it is common to ask whether it meets both the deductive standards and inductive standards.