1. The Subject:

Before I can communicate effectively, I must consider:

1. What do we already know about this subject?
2. What research is required for me to know more about this subject?
3. Are there different perspectives regarding the subject?
   
4. What types of evidence or proofs exist for these perspectives?
   
5. Which proofs are useful for my argument?
6. How do I support my claims with evidence?

 

But, Aristotle argued that knowing a subject is not sufficient for effective communication.

 

2. The Audience: 

 

Examples of audience: a teacher, the audience of a play, the reader of a newspaper, a novel, a textbook

Before I can communicate effectively, I must: 

 

1. Speculate about audience expectations.
   
2. Speculate about audience’s prior knowledge.
   
3. Speculate about audience’s disposition. 

 

In the classroom, your teachers will often spell out the audience’s expectation: “Write a five paragraph argumentative essay.” “State your thesis in the last sentence of the introductory paragraph.” “Use two outside sources.” “Have fun.”

 

However, when there is no fixed assignment, you must use experience and observation to imagine your audience in order to decide how best to communicate with that audience.

 

3. The Speaker’ Persona:

 

Writing is a form of imposture. “I’m not at all sure I am anything like the person I seem to a reader.” -E.B. White. (Merriam Webster: an instance of pretending to be someone else in order to deceive others.)

As I write, I create the character of the speaker. Aristotle called this the persona.

I use who I am, what I know and feel, what I have seen and done (my experience) to find my attitude toward the subject, and my understanding of the reader.

I create my persona – my speaking voice – through every decision I make in writing:
For example:

1. Will I use formal or informal language?
   
2. Will I use narration or quotations?
   
3. Will my tone be familiar or objective? 

 

The Appeals

Together, he referred to ethos, logos, and pathos as the three modes of persuasion, or sometimes simply as “the appeals.” Aristotle believed that in order to have ethos a good speaker must demonstrate three things:

• Phronesis: Sound reasoning, and relevant experience or expertise.
• Arete: Moral character.
• Eunoia: Good intentions towards the audience.

Aristotle argued that a speaker in possession of these three attributes will naturally impress the audience with his or her ethos, and as a result will be better able to influence that audience. Over time, however, the definition of ethos has broadened, and the significance of the three qualities Aristotle named is now lost on anyone who hasn’t studied classical Greek. So it may give more insight into the meaning of ethos to translate Aristotle’s three categories into a new set of categories that make more sense in the modern era. A speaker or writer’s credibility can be said to rely on each of the following:

• Authority: A speaker in a high position of authority—for example, a president, or CEO—will possess a certain level of ethos simply because he or she can claim that title.
  • Within literature, it’s interesting to notice when characters attempt to invoke their own authority and enhance their ethos by reminding other characters of the titles they possess. Often, this can be an indication that the character citing his or her own credentials actually feels his or her authority being threatened or challenged.
• Trustworthiness: Often, a large part of conveying trustworthiness to an audience depends on the speaker’s ability to demonstrate that he or she doesn’t have a vested interest in convincing the audience of his or her views. An audience should ideally feel that the speaker is impartial—doesn’t stand to gain anything personal, like money or power, from winning listeners’ favor—and that his or her opinions are therefore objective.
  • In literature, this form of ethos is particularly relevant with respect to narrators. Authors often have their narrators profess impartiality or objectivity at the outset of a book in order to earn the reader’s trust in the narrator’s reliability regarding the story he or she is about to tell.
• Expertise: The credentials, education, and professional specialty of a speaker all greatly contribute to his or her ethos. For instance, a doctor’s assessment of a patient or a new drug will carry more weight with an audience than the opinion of someone with no medical training whatsoever.
  • This type of ethos translates into literature quite easily, in the sense that characters’ opinions are often evaluated within the framework of their professions.
• Similarity: Speakers can strengthen their ethos by pointing out things that they share with an audience. This is a common technique in American politics where, for example, a candidate for office might describe his or her modest upbringing, in an effort to demonstrate that he or she is an average American and therefore shares the same values as voters. On the other hand, some speakers might find it more useful to convey that they are not like the audience and have a fresh, outside perspective. Either way, an important part of ethos is deciding whether to portray oneself as an insider or as an outsider to best make a point.
  • Literary characters often use ethos to communicate similarity or likemindedness to other characters, and you can detect this by certain changes in their speech. In these situations, characters (as well as real-life speakers) often use a shibboleth—a specialized term or word used by a specific group of people—to show that they belong. For example, if you knew the name of a special chemical used to make jello, and you wanted to impress the head of a jello company, the name of that chemical would count as a shibboleth and saying it would help you show the jello executive that you’re “in the know.”

The Stagecraft of Ethos

In order to impress their positive personal qualities upon audiences, public speakers can use certain techniques that aren’t available to writers. These include:

• Speaking in a certain manner or even with a certain accent.
• Demonstrating confident stage presence.
• Having reputable people to introduce the speaker in a positive light.
• Listing their credentials and achievements.

Put another way, the ethos of a speech can be heavily impacted by the speaker’s confidence and manner of presenting him or herself.

Examples: Ethos

Politicians have always tried to connect ideas in every day life with their own agenda and narratives. Here are some examples from the world of political speeches.

t’s no secret a politician must be a master persuader. They have to earn the confidence of legions of people across a city or town, or even across a nation. One of the best ways to do that is to align their ethical code with the people they’re trying to elicit votes from. Let’s take a look at powerful orators who apply ethos to their speeches.

Barack Obama

In his speech in 2012, Barack Obama couldn’t be any more transparent in his use of ethos. He begins his speech by setting down his authority as a president and clarifying what he’s learned. You can see this through the excerpt.

“Now, the first time I addressed this convention, in 2004, I was a younger man — (laughter) — a Senate candidate from Illinois who spoke about hope, not blind optimism, not wishful thinking but hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the face of uncertainty, that dogged faith in the future which has pushed this nation forward even when the odds are great, even when the road is long.

Eight years later that hope has been tested by the cost of war, by one of the worst economic crises in history and by political gridlock that’s left us wondering whether it’s still even possible to tackle the challenges of our time. I know campaigns can seem small, even silly sometimes.”

Winston Churchill

Another great who was able to effectively use ethos in his speeches was Winston Churchill. In his 1941 address to the joint session, he establishes his credibility as a speaker. He shows the audience what he shares with common people. This excerpt works well to demonstrate his moral values.

“I may confess, however, that I do not feel quite like a fish out of water in a legislative assembly where English is spoken. I am a child of the House of Commons. I was brought up in my father’s house to believe in democracy. ‘Trust the people.’ That was his message. I used to see him cheered at meetings and in the streets by crowds of workingmen way back in those aristocratic Victorian days when as Disraeli said ‘the world was for the few, and for the very few.'”

Mitt Romney

When he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, Romney pointed to his business success as relevant experience that would serve him well if he were to take office:

“I learned the real lessons about how America works from experience.

When I was 37, I helped start a small company. My partners and I had been working for a company that was in the business of helping other businesses.

So some of us had this idea that if we really believed our advice was helping companies, we should invest in companies. We should bet on ourselves and on our advice.

So we started a new business called Bain Capital…That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I’m pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised.”

Logos is an argument that appeals to an audience’s sense of logic or reason. For example, when a speaker cites scientific data, methodically walks through the line of reasoning behind their argument, or precisely recounts historical events relevant to their argument, he or she is using logos.

Logos: pārongo

Using logos as an appeal means reasoning with your audience, providing them with facts and statistics, or making historical and literal analogies:

• Aristotle defined logos as the “proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.” In other words, logos rests in the actual written content of an argument.
• The three “modes of persuasion”—pathos, logos, and ethos—were originally defined by Aristotle.
• In contrast to logos’s appeal to reason, ethos is an appeal to the audience based on the speaker’s authority, while pathos is an appeal to the audience ‘s emotions.
• Data, facts, statistics, test results, and surveys can all strengthen the logos of a presentation.

Logos and Different Types of Proof

While it’s easy to spot a speaker using logos when he or she presents statistics or research results, numerical data is only one form that logos can take. Logos is any statement, sentence, or argument that attempts to persuade using facts, and these facts need not be the result of long research. “The facts” of an argument can also be drawn from the speaker’s own life or from the world at large, and presenting these examples to support one’s view is also a form of logos. Take this example from Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in support of women’s rights:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?

Truth points to her own strength, as well as to the fact that she can perform physically tiring tasks just as well as a man, as proof of equality between the sexes: she’s still appealing to the audience’s reason, but instead of presenting abstract truths about reality or numerical evidence, she’s presenting the facts of her own experience as evidence. In this case, the logic of the argument is anecdotal (meaning it’s derived from a handful of personal experiences) rather than purely theoretical, but it goes to show that logos doesn’t have to be dry and clinical just because it’s concerned with proving something logically.

Logos: Proof vs. Apparent Proof

Not all speakers who use logos can be blindly trusted. As Aristotle specifies in his definition of the term, logos can be “proof, or apparent proof.” A speaker may present facts, figures, and research data simply to show that he or she has “done their homework,” in an effort to attain the degree of credibility that is often automatically attributed to scientific studies and evidence-driven arguments. Or a speaker might present facts in a way that is wholly or partially misrepresentative, using those facts (and, by extension, logos) to make a claim that feels credible while actually arguing something that is untrue. Yet another factor that can cause a speech or text to have the appearance of providing proof is the use of overlong words and technical language—but just because someone sounds smart doesn’t mean their argument stands to reason.

Even if the facts have been manipulated, any argument that relies on or even just claims to rely on “facts” to appeal to a listener’s reason is still an example of logos. Put another way: logos is not about using facts correctly or accurately, it’s about using facts in any way to influence an audience.

Examples: Logos

Politicians frequently use logos, often by citing statistics or examples, to persuade their listeners of the success or failure of policies, politicians, and ideologies.

Obama

In this example, Obama cites historical precedent and economic data from past years to strengthen his argument that recent progress has been substantial and that the nation’s economy is in good health:

But tonight, we turn the page. Tonight, after a breakthrough year for America, our economy is growing and creating jobs at the fastest pace since 1999. Our unemployment rate is now lower than it was before the financial crisis. More of our kids are graduating than ever before. More of our people are insured than ever before. And we are as free from the grip of foreign oil as we’ve been in almost 30 years.

Ronald Reagan

In this speech, Reagan intends for his comparison between the poverty of East Berlin—controlled by the Communists—and the prosperity of Democratic West Berlin to serve as hard evidence supporting the economic superiority of Western capitalism. The way he uses specific details about the physical landscape of West Berlin as proof of Western capitalist economic superiority is a form of logos:

Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany–busy office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the spreading lawns of parkland. Where a city’s culture seemed to have been destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today there’s abundance–food, clothing, automobiles–the wonderful goods of the Ku’damm. From devastation, from utter ruin, you Berliners have, in freedom, rebuilt a city that once again ranks as one of the greatest on earth…In the 1950s, Khrushchev [leader of the communist Soviet Union] predicted: “We will bury you.” But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind—too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.

Pathos: aurongo

Pathos is an argument that appeals to an audience’s emotions. When a speaker tells a personal story, presents an audience with a powerful visual image, or appeals to an audience’s sense of duty or purpose in order to influence listeners’ emotions in favor of adopting the speaker’s point of view, he or she is using pathos.

Some additional key details about pathos:

• You may also hear the word “pathos” used to mean “a quality that invokes sadness or pity,” as in the statement, “The actor’s performance was full of pathos.” However, this guide focuses specifically on the rhetorical technique of pathos used in literature and public speaking to persuade readers and listeners through an appeal to emotion.
• The three “modes of persuasion”—pathos, logos, and ethos—were originally defined by Aristotle.
• In contrast to pathos, which appeals to the listener’s emotions, logos appeals to the audience’s sense of reason, while ethos appeals to the audience based on the speaker’s authority.
• Although Aristotle developed the concept of pathos in the context of oratory and speechmaking, authors, poets, and advertisers also use pathos frequently.

Pathos in Depth

Aristotle (the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist) first defined pathos, along with logos and ethos, in his treatise on rhetoric, Ars Rhetorica. Together, he referred to pathos, logos, and ethos as the three modes of persuasion, or sometimes simply as “the appeals.” Aristotle defined pathos as “putting the audience in a certain frame of mind,” and argued that to achieve this task a speaker must truly know and understand his or her audience. For instance, in Ars Rhetorica, Aristotle describes the information a speaker needs to rile up a feeling of anger in his or her audience:

Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one.

Here, Aristotle articulates that it’s not enough to know the dominant emotions that move one’s listeners: you also need to have a deeper understanding of the listeners’ values, and how these values motivate their emotional responses to specific individuals and behaviors.

The philosopher and psychologist William James once said, “The emotions aren’t always immediately subject to reason, but they are always immediately subject to action.” Pathos is a powerful tool, enabling speakers to galvanize their listeners into action, or persuade them to support a desired cause. Speechwriters, politicians, and advertisers use pathos for precisely this reason: to influence their audience to a desired belief or action.

The use of pathos in literature is often different than in public speeches, since it’s less common for authors to try to directly influence their readers in the way politicians might try to influence their audiences. Rather, authors often employ pathos by having a character make use of it in their own speech. In doing so, the author may be giving the reader some insight into a character’s values, motives, or their perception of another character.

Pathos vs Logos and Ethos

Pathos is often criticized as being the least substantial or legitimate of the three persuasive modest. Arguments using logos appeal to listeners’ sense of reason through the presentation of facts and a well-structured argument. Meanwhile, arguments using ethos generally try to achieve credibility by relying on the speaker’s credentials and reputation. Therefore, both logos and ethos may seem more concrete—in the sense of being more evidence-based—than pathos, which “merely” appeals to listeners’ emotions. But people often forget that facts, statistics, credentials, and personal history can be easily manipulated or fabricated in order to win the confidence of an audience, while people at the same time underestimate the power and importance of being able to expertly direct the emotional current of an audience to win their allegiance or sympathy.

Examples: Pathos

Whenever someone tries to make you feel bad enough to do something, they’re using pathos as a rhetorical tool. They can also use pathos to explain how happy they would feel if you helped them out, or how hard it will be for them if you don’t.

Pathos examples in everyday life include:

• A teenager tries to convince his parents to buy him a new car by saying if they cared about their child’s safety they’d upgrade him.
• A man at the car dealership implores the salesman to offer the best price on a new car because he needs to support his young family.
• A boyfriend begs his girlfriend to stay with him, claiming “If you really love me, you’ll give me time to change my ways.”
• A car commercial depicts a teary-eyed parent saying goodbye to their child as they go off to college, sad but assured that they’re sending their child away in a reliable, safe car.
• Charity organizations show images of starving orphans living in dire conditions who need your help with monthly financial support.

Obama

In August 2013, the Syrian government, led by Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons against Syrians who opposed his regime, causing several countries—including the United States—to consider military intervention in the conflict. Obama’s tragic descriptions of civilians who died as a result of the attack are an example of pathos: they provoke an emotional response and help him mobilize American sentiment in favor of U.S. intervention.

Over the past two years, what began as a series of peaceful protests against the oppressive regime of Bashar al-Assad has turned into a brutal civil war. Over 100,000 people have been killed. Millions have fled the country…The situation profoundly changed, though, on August 21st, when Assad’s government gassed to death over 1,000 people, including hundreds of children. The images from this massacre are sickening: men, women, children lying in rows, killed by poison gas, others foaming at the mouth, gasping for breath, a father clutching his dead children, imploring them to get up and walk.

Reagan

In 1987, the Berlin Wall divided Communist East Berlin from Democratic West Berlin. The Wall was a symbol of the divide between the communist Soviet Union, or Eastern Bloc, and the Western Bloc which included the United States, NATO and its allies. The wall also split Berlin in two, obstructing one of Berlin’s most famous landmarks: the Brandenburg Gate.

Reagan’s speech, delivered to a crowd in front of the Brandenburg Gate, contains many examples of pathos:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe…Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly…Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar…

General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Reagan moves his listeners to feel outrage at the Wall’s existence by calling it a “scar.” He assures Germans that the world is invested in the city’s problems by telling the crowd that “Every man is a Berliner.” Finally, he excites and invigorates the listener by boldly daring Gorbachev, president of the Soviet Union, to “tear down this wall!”

Here is the speech from Jacinda Ardern for the Memorial of the Christchurch Mosque Attack

Ko te reo te tuakiri | Language is my identity.  
Ko te reo tōku ahurei | Language is my uniqueness.
Ko te reo te ora. | Language is life.