Ethos Pathos Logos

Good writing is an elusive topic that is always changing as we learn. The biggest aspects of good writing are genre, audience, purpose, and the three appeals--ethos, pathos and logos. Good writers need to write within a specific genre and the conventions that come with it. Good writing also considers the audience and potential secondary audiences. Purpose plays into good writing because without purpose writing is pointless, a good writer needs to know what they are trying to accomplish and who their writing is intended for, so this is closely tied to audience. Finally, good writing requires a balance of ethos, pathos, and logos that depends on the situation. There are many aspects of good writing, and they change based on the type of writing.

Genre is the first part of good writing. A good writer needs to be able to choose the genre that they are writing and write within it because this determines the content of the writing. Every genre comes with pre-existing expectations like tone and word choice. For example, an academic essay has a completely different tone than an online article. The same idea can be expressed in many ways, so genre is the first thing that determines which version to use. This can be seen in my source analysis essay and third blog post. In both I express the idea that the audience expects to learn how to edit videos. In the analysis essay I phrased this as “the audience expects to learn how to do both basic and more advanced editing techniques,” and in my blog post this is phrased as “Finally ready to begin editing but don’t know where to start?” Both of these have the same general idea, but because of the genre they were written for, the tone is very different, and both have different assumptions built into them. The analysis version is assuming that the reader is not necessarily in the same intended audience as the blog post because it refers to the audience as a different group, where as the blog post version directly speaks to the audience. Genre is important because it determines everything from tone to the audience you are addressing.
Audience is important for good writing because a writer needs to know who their main audience is as well as potential secondary audiences. Audience mainly influences tone and word choice. For a broader audience, the language needs to be more general that if you were writing something for a specific group where you can use more specific language. For example, when writing my analysis essay, where the audience is the teacher, I used language specific to what we have learned in class, like “. . . the enthymeme--the claim, reasoning, and assumption format--to be fulfilled. . .” where as in the blog post, the audience is the general public so I used language like “Here are the first steps to creating a masterfully edited video.” These two examples are addressing completely different audiences, the analysis essay uses language specific to class discussions, and the blog post uses language that will keep an online audience interested. Audience also ties into purpose because the audience needs a purpose for reading just as much as the writer needs a purpose for writing. A good writer needs to give their audience a purpose for reading their work, so they need to have a clear purpose for writing.
Purpose is important to good writing because without it writing literally has no point.

A good writer knows exactly what they want to accomplish and how they want to do it, and makes this abundantly clear for the audience. Different types of writing accomplish this in different ways, so this is also closely tied to genre. For example, an academic essay states the purpose by having a thesis statement which is usually at about the same place in every essay, the end of the introduction. In my analysis essay my thesis statement was “The most important aspects of composing an effective online source are communication with the audience, achieving a clear purpose, and two of the three appeals, logos and ethos.” This single sentence clearly states exactly what the purpose of writing the essay is by listing every topic that will be addressed in the essay. My blog posts though, stated their purpose a lot more concisely, and usually right in the first sentence of the post. My second post does this by saying “Before you can actually start editing your project, you need to make sure your the most important parts of your setup are configured to get the best experience with Premiere Pro as possible.” This states its purpose just as clearly as the thesis statement does, but does not list every single topic. This is an instance where genre helps to determine how the purpose is stated. A blog post needs a different style from an analysis essay, and these topic sentences clearly show that when they state their

purpose.
The three appeals, ethos, pathos, and logos, are important to consider when it comes to good writing, but not all three need to be used at the same time. Most of the time, writing will use two of the three, for example a logic based argument needs some sort of credibility behind it, and an emotionally based argument should have some sort of logic accompanying it. A good writer can find the balance between these three things and use all of them effectively. My blog posts are almost entirely logos based, with the ethos credibility implied in them, and the same goes for my analysis essay. Neither of these required any use of pathos because this would have distracted from the important information that I was writing about. Pathos has its uses though, just not in formal writing like an essay or informational writing like an educational blog post. The first thing that comes to mind when considering pathos use is advertisements, but it can also be used in a variety of other types of writing. The three appeals are an integral part of any good writing.
The things I learned about good writing can be used in the future because there will never be a time where I will not have to write anything. Whether it is a professional email, a resume, or program notes for a recital, I will always need to be writing something, and knowing how to write effectively will be a priceless skill in the rest of my professional career.