Heymann's Expository Essay

“Authorizing torture is a bad and dangerous idea that can easily be made to sound plausible.” This is a shockingly true statement. Heymann’s purpose in writing this article is to persuade readers to agree with him that torture should not be authorized. Heymann uses the persuasive appeal of pathos primarily in this article to convince his readers to agree with him. Although that is not to say he did not use other forms of persuasive appeal, heymann also used Logos and Ethos, just not as strongly as Pathos. After examining the article, heymann’s use of Pathos should be seen as effective at persuading his audience because of how he uses positive and negative emotions, writes clearly and applies vivid details. Heymann begins his article by clearly laying out his emotional standpoint. He states, “Authorizing torture is a bad and dangerous idea that can easily be made to sound plausible.”
This quote shows Pathos well in that he is being very clear about his subject matter. The reader, then, is able to understand the issue he is looking at with this single introductory line. This shows Pathos because there is no confusion about what Heymann is going to be talking about in the article. This is effective because his audience must understand the issue before they can comprehend his side of it, and his presentation works well in doing just that.

Heymann stated that the fear of that led us to accept the Geneva convention. This shows that he is not just assuming that torture is bad and dangerous based on emotional stance. He is using a strong source, Geneva convention, to say that if you look back to the people and let people define right and wrong without some structure the world would run ramped. Therefore using the acceptance of the Geneva convention to say that we have some sort of