Ebola Persuasive Essay

I wrote an essay, What Methods Would Effectively Prevent the Spread of Ebola?, that identified ways to stop the spread of the Ebola Virus. Every month there is a new, highly talked about topic of interest. These past few months, this topic was Ebola. It became one of the most talked about topics in Fall 2014 because it was brought to United States from Africa, where it has been an ongoing epidemic. Many citizens feared for their lives about what was to come. When talking about Ebola it is easy to persuade people how dangerous the disease is by playing with people’s emotions, while using frightening reasons, but if there is no authority to back up the logic it is not nearly as effective. In order to properly write an excellent persuasive essay, you need to make sure you apply all of the appeals: pathos, logos, and ethos; and to make your article more appealing use the most effective tone and create imagery.
The first major appeal, pathos, is “the quality or power, esp in …show more content…
Ethos refers to the trustworthiness or credibility of the writer or speaker. (Henning, 1998.) In order to be completely persuasive, you need to have good credibility to back up the emotional and logical aspects. I definitely lacked ethos in my Ebola essay simply because I am not apart of the medical field, and most certainly not a doctor or nurse. I did, however, add facts that were released by the World Health Organization and the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. They are both pretty reliable sources, and if the information is coming from them it must be pretty believable. In one part of my essay I started a sentence off by saying “Officials said”, these really brings down the ethos appeal because no one knows whom I am talking about. Who are the officials I mentioned? In order for my position paper to be top notch, I should have found a way to strengthen my