• Argument
• Artistic Proofs
• Audience
• Oration
• Parts of a Speech
• Pathos
• Pathos and Persuasion: The Validity of Emotional Appeals

Examples and Observations:

• "In many respects, pity and related feelings are desirable emotions. They draw our attention to the suffering of others, and encourage us to be sensitive and respond to the needs of vulnerable people. These feelings can be constructive and helpful, but in themselves they do not provide reasons for action or belief."
  (Trudy Govier, A Practical Study of Argument. Wadsworth, Cengage 2010)

• Barack Obama's Use of Commiseratio
  " . . . I saw it just the other day in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his eight-year-old daughter whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care. I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd, listening to that father’s story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes because we knew that little girl could be our own.
  
  "And I know that every American wants her future to be just as bright. That’s who we are. That’s the country I’m so proud to lead as your president.
  
  "And tonight, despite all the hardship we’ve been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I’ve never been more hopeful about our future. . . ."
  (President Barack Obama, election night victory speech, November 7, 2012)
• Marc Antony's Use of Commiseratio
  "O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
  Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
  Whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us.
  O, now you weep; and, I perceive, you feel
  The dint of pity: these are gracious drops.
  Kind souls, what, weep you when you but behold
  Our Caesar's vesture wounded? Look you here,
  Here is himself, marr'd, as you see, with traitors."
  (Marc Antony in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act III, scene 2)

• Richard Lanham on Commiseratio
  "Several Latin words (commiseratio, conquestio, lamentio, misericordia) and two Greek ones (eleos and oiktos) have been used to describe the evocation of pity in general and, in particular, to denote that part of the peroration, the closing section of the oration, which seeks to evoke pity and sympathy for one's case. The appeal to pity is made 'by the use of commonplaces which set forth the power of fortune over all men and the weakness of the human race. When such a passage is delivered gravely and sententiously, the spirit of man is greatly abased and prepared for pity' ([Cicero's] De Inventione, I.liv.106). Both the [Rhetorica] Ad Herennium and De Inventione warn that the appeal to pity should be brief, for 'nothing dries more quickly than a tear.'"
  (Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. University of California Press, 1991)
• "[I]n the case of commiseratio, appeals for pity, Cicero is more elaborate than the author of Ad Herennium, and solemnly enumerates no fewer than sixteen different themes. Both authors however end with the advice not to linger too long on the appeal to pity . . .."
  (M. L. Clarke and D. H. Berry, Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey, 3rd ed. Routledge, 1996)