“Ethos, Logos, and Pathos in Writing”

           

Writing is one of the hardest tasks that many college students especially the freshmen face. Having been in the same track of learning, I have encountered difficulties in the various aspects of writing which include coming up with a topic and writing about it comprehensively. Colleges have very high expectations that the students are expected to meet in their writing assignments. Catherine Savini in her article “Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment” explores the steps followed in coming up with a good piece of work. Susan McLeod in her article “Some Thoughts about Feelings: The Affective Domain and the Writing Process” illustrates that writing involves emotions. On the other hand, Sondra Perl in the article “Understanding Composing” explores the steps involved in writing.  These three articles contain very important information that many college students can make use in coming up with a more compelling piece of work. It is therefore clear that writing involves ethos, pathos, and logos and therefore to become a writer one should take all these aspects into consideration.

            Writing is a difficult, emotional and a cognitive activity. Writing involves both feeling and thinking. It is common for students while writing to experience some kind of emotion or tension especially when they have to write about something that they feel is complicated to them. I have come to realize that I am comfortable while writing about the topics that enjoy most especially when I am relaxing. However, I may get tensed when I am writing topics that are not familiar hence attracting chances of writing poor quality work. The key thing that I have come to realize is to try and contain emotions or make them work in my favor instead of working against me. As Susan McLeod points out, “We can work out specific coping strategies to help students control their affective reactions-monitoring their emotional state, allocating their energy, stopping themselves when they are over-excited-so that their emotions work for them rather than against them” (McLeod 433). Therefore, emotions will always be there and students have to learn how to control these emotions so as to maintain a successful writing career.

One of the things students find to be difficult is coming up with a good topic or a good thesis. It is likely that students may get stuck for a day or more while trying to figure out the best topic that is suitable for their piece of work.  This is something that I have also experienced myself. There are instances where I spend days trying to come up with a topic. When I finally come up with one topic and start writing about it, I come to notice that I don’t have enough content or material on it.  In such situations, I am forced to start the whole process again and look for a new topic from scratch. To come up with a good topic on which to base an argument, one has to consider a problem that needs to be solved. This claim is valid due to the fact that “problems motivate good papers, and good problems will lead you to your thesis argument” (Savini 55). It is possible to cultivate and take advantage of a problem to modify thinking so as to come up with a better paper. In my opinion, I believe that trying to look for answers to a given problem is a good place to start an argument and write a compelling paper.

 What many students don’t recognize is that writing is not just a continuous process. Writing is recursive. It is common to keep on going back to what you had written before so as to get a better idea of what to write next. Sometimes one has to change some parts that had been written before so as to suit the shift in the thinking.  This is a technique that is widely used even by the most experienced writers and therefore, college students should not shy away from using this technique.  As Perl points out, such recursive movements “show us the fallacy of reducing the composing process to a simple linear scheme and they leave us with the potential for creating even more powerful ways of understanding composing.” This is true because as we write, some new ideas always come to our minds. These ideas may be better than the original ideas that we had before and therefore, changing some aspects of the work that you had previously written to incorporate the new ideas makes the whole paper better than it could have been with the original idea.

            Learning how ethos, pathos, and logos affects writing is an important step in coming up with a good piece of work. It is important to recognize that writing is not a passive exercise and involves emotions and how well to use emotions to work for you and not against you. It is also good to recognize the best way to which one can be able to come up with a good thesis topic. The best place to start is identifying the problem that needs to be solved. A formulation of questions that need to be answered is the next step of the problem solving process. Finally, it is important to go back and forth during any form of writing as this helps the writer to incorporate some new ideas into the papers that may be of great importance in making the whole paper better. These three aspects of writing are critical for all students as it will help them maintain a brilliant writing career throughout their undergraduate program and in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited:

McLeod, Susan. "Some Thoughts about Feelings: The Affective Domain and the Writing Process."   College Composition and Communication 38.4 (1987): 426-435.

Perl, Sondra. "Understanding Composing." College Composition and Communication 31.4 (1980): 363-369.

Savini, Catherine. "Looking for Trouble: Finding Your Way into a Writing Assignment."   Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing Vol. 1. Eds. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. Anderson: Parlor Press, (2011): 52-70.