Pathos

An appeal to pathos is a powerful rhetorical device because of the impact personal experience can have. As stalin said: One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Listing countless impersonal reasons for your claim gives you only numbers. If you can force your audience to identify with what you are saying, they are invested in your argument and can much more easily see your side. The plight of a working mother widowed by the Iraq war has a much heavier impact than a listing of the thousands who have died because we can imagine our own families torn apart by such a strife. Our minds cannot so easily grasp the faces of the thousands who have lost their lives. People are creatures of emotion, and few can stay completely removed from their feelings. When you introduce emotion into your argument, you can often remove the necessity of providing appeals to logos or ethos, because your audience has been blinded by the emotions they now feel.