Persuasive Language: Rhetorical Appeals
This appeal relies on facts, statistics, and data to convince an audience.
What is logos?
This type of organism makes its own energy directly from sunlight.
What is a producer?
When analyzing a real argument, this is the first thing you should identify.
What is the appeal (ethos, pathos, or logos)?
A strong claim must be arguable, specific, and this third quality.
What is defensible?
This text feature tells you the topic before you've read a single sentence.
What is a heading or title?
A speaker opens with “20 years as a field biologist” to establish trust — that's an appeal to this.
What is ethos?
This organism breaks down dead material and returns nutrients to the ecosystem.
What is a decomposer?
A rating of “5, because it was convincing” is missing this.
What is a specific detail or line from the text?
This is what's wrong with the claim “The Indiana bat is an endangered species.”
What is: it's a fact, not an arguable position?
Unlike a topic, this is a full-sentence claim the whole text supports.
What is a central idea?
A print ad shows a single starving polar bear on a shrinking ice floe, with no text at all.
What is pathos?
This rule says only about 10% of energy transfers from one trophic level to the next.
What is the 10% Rule?
This is the specific method a text uses to deliver an appeal — like a rhetorical question or a statistic.
What is a technique?
This is what's wrong with the claim “Should we protect endangered species?”
What is: it's a question, not a claim?
A text organized “Why It's a Problem” then “Stopping the Spread” uses this text structure.
What is problem & solution?
This persuasive technique repeats a word or phrase so it sticks in the audience's memory.
What is repetition?
Unlike a food chain, this model shows all the overlapping feeding connections in an ecosystem.
What is a food web?
In her UN Earth Summit speech, Severn Suzuki leans on this appeal by speaking as a child to world leaders.
What is pathos?
Turn this weak claim into a strong one: “Pollution is bad.”
What is a specific, arguable, defensible rewrite — e.g. “Our city should ban single-use plastics because...”?
This text feature pulls out numbers or facts for fast reference, often in a shaded box.
What is a sidebar or “Quick Facts” box?
A speech pairs a statistic about population decline with a personal story about losing a family well — name both appeals at work.
What are logos and pathos?
This principle explains how an invasive species can wipe out a native species' role in a food web without ever eating it directly.
What is competitive exclusion?
A speech uses a statistic AND a personal story about losing well water to pollution — name the 2 appeals combined.
What are logos and pathos?
This is the 3-item checklist partners use to peer-critique each other's claims.
What are arguable, specific, and defensible?
Write a central idea sentence — not just a topic — for a text about the whooping crane's recovery from 15 birds in 1941.
What is something like “The whooping crane's recovery from just 15 birds in 1941 shows what sustained conservation can accomplish”?