Pathos in Christopher Smith's Speech (Essay Sample)

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course Number
Date
Pathos in Christopher Smith Speech
Pathos is a rhetoric device for appealing to the audience's emotions. Its effectiveness primarily relies on the ability of a writer or speaker to understand the feelings associated with the issue being addressed. US representative Christopher Smith intended to convince his audience that embryonic stem cells should not be allowed because they are destroyed. Pathos is one of the rhetoric devices Smith uses. He explains why the availability of alternatives makes embryonic stem cells research an unforgivable sin that should be avoided by all the stakeholders involved. Pathos is used by appealing to empathy, values, concerns, and shared need. Not all speakers and writers use the four pathos appeals to convince their customers. US representative Christopher Smith's speech appropriately uses the pathos' appeals by presenting embryonic stem cells research as the destruction that threatens to have children like Hannah in the future.
US representative Christopher Smith's speech uses pathos to appeal to empathy. Empathy, in the context of rhetorics, is the ability of a writer or speaker to understand aspects that their audience might emotionally respond to. When he says, “I will reassure her that there is no such thing as a spare or leftover person,” the intention is to ensure his audience empathize with Hannah Strege, whom he introduces as the face of debate over stem-cell research (Smith 1). By using empathy, he does not have to do much to tap the audience's emotions, especially because he capitalizes on Hannah's age and innocence to highlight how unfair it might be for decisions that she does not understand anything about affect her. She is used as evidence that there are many frozen embryos whose destinies are prevented by them being locked up in an In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) clinic. It is