When we talk about persuasion in rhetoric, there are three terms that you'll often come across. These are ethos, logos, and pathos. Each of these is familiar to us from the classical writer Aristotle, and Aristotle lived in the fourth century BC, so a long time ago, but these terms are still used today. So ethos and logos and pathos then are used by Aristotle to talk about persuasion, and he defines rhetoric, the field of rhetoric, as an ability in each particular case to see the available means of persuasion.
So you really want to make sure that you fit your argument to your audience, to the situation, and that's why when we think about these terms we have to relate them to the rhetorical situation. So we have a writer or a public speaker, we have a text or a speech, and we have an audience, and we can see that the direction or the influence is sort of from left to right here. The writer produces a text to influence or persuade the audience of a particular point of view. Let's first quickly then talk about what these terms refer to, and then we'll look at some examples both from writing and from the world of advertisement.
Ethos then is all about the credibility of the speaker. So we might say the authority of the speaker. Logos has much more to do with logic. It's the logic of the argument.
Does the argument make sense? Can we see some kind of cause and effect? And Aristotle talked about particular logical arguments, so the syllogism for instance. We have a number of premises and they lead to some kind of conclusion. And then pathos is the appeal to the emotions.
It's really the appeal to the heart. Classical writers of course debated to what extent the heart should influence us. Should we be influenced by reason, as certainly Plato tried to emphasize, or would it be okay to have some element of emotion? And if you read more of Aristotle you'll come across other terms like catharsis, for instance, that talk about a kind of release of emotion, especially in an artistic context. So we have Ethos, logos, and pathos then, and you can see how each of these is associated with one part of the rhetorical situation.
Ethos has to do with whether you believe the speaker just based on who that person is. Logos has to do with the actual contents, the logic of the argument, and then pathos has to do with the way in which the text or the argument affects you personally. Is it a tearjerker? Is it something that makes you have to pity or charity or anger even. And Aristotle talks about all these different emotions.
So that's the basic idea, the basic distinction. Let's now look at a few examples of how this plays out. What I have for you here is just a couple of sample letters to the editor, and when you're trying to persuade an audience of a point of view in an editorial then you definitely do want to think about where you want to put the emphasis. Do you want to be emotional?
Do you want to be really focused on the argument? Do you want to make sure that your credentials are on display? These are all things to consider.
So our first one here then is a kind of editorial kind of reply to a particular news story about the replacement of fighter jets. Now this is not really an argument that's based on pathos. There's not much emotion in here.
It's an argument that's based really on the other two methods of persuasion, and we see ethos in a number of different ways. So we see ethos when the writer actually specifically points out his or her credentials. So this author says, well, I am a retired pilot. So you should believe me because I know about these things.
I have some credentials, and you can see that he's a colonel as well. I suppose it could be a she with the letter j as well. So that's ethos, but ethos is much more than that in writing. It's not just about who the person is, but it's also about the way in which the person comes across, and that can include, for instance, a sense of fair-mindedness.
It can include a sense that the writer takes other people's arguments seriously. All of these these aspects are part of ethos. It also comes through in the writing style.
Is this a person who can write well? Then you might be able to trust that person to some extent because there's a skill set there, and if they have a writing skill, said, then perhaps they also have a knowledge base to kind of found their arguments on. So those are a few aspects of ethos here, and even when you start reading it says, I was surprised to read. This is still part of ethos, not just because there's an I here, but also because the writer doesn't say, I was amazed to find out and I can't believe what's happened, and it's outrageous.
That would suggest to you that kind of over-the-top expression that this is a person who is a bit more extreme in his or her views. But if you start with, I was surprised to find out that's a fairly mild expression, then you get the sense that this is not a person that's easily rocked by different things. This is a person who's fairly mild-mannered, who will write a letter to the editor but is careful not to sort of go over the top. On the other hand, if you look at the last bit of this letter, it says the suggestion that the new jets will have communication issues is likely just a fabrication made up by Boeing, the airplane manufacturer that did not get the contract.
So here we have speculation. It's probably just the other company who's making up this kind of rumor or this kind of story. What does that say about the author?
Does this suggest that this is an author who is willing to entertain speculation and rumor and potentially gossip as well. Is that what we want? So those are all aspects of ethos, and one thing that Aristotle really points out is that you can't just think of ethos as the kind of context of the story, what you know about the author.
So if you look at a book for instance and you see the picture of the author on the dust jacket, you could say, well yeah this is JK Rowling's, right? This is the author of Harry Potter, I should... believe this person or expect this person to write a great story.
That would be basing your whole sense of ethos on context. But ethos in a rhetorical situation, according to Aristotle, is very much about how you present yourself in the moment, in the act. So to build up ethos as a writer you cannot assume that people know who you are, especially in an essay kind of context. You have to create your sense of ethos entirely from scratch. and you have to do that through the way in which you represent yourself.
So do you represent yourself as somebody fair-minded, open, willing to think about other arguments? Do you represent yourself as somebody who is open to gossip, easily angered? These are all different possibilities out there.
Then we also have logos in this particular example, and one of the arguments here is that the Americans are already working with this particular airplane company. They're fixing the problem, and there is a solution coming. There's also this logical argument with new technology.
There's always a process of adaptation and implementation, so logos is really the kind of content of the argument. There may be multiple arguments, and we can talk about whether we find the argument convincing or not. Then the last one here is pathos, and this second example shows a lot more pathos.
In fact, that's almost entirely what we have here. So this is somebody who's really angry because his tires have been punctured by a bunch of goths, and he says to the goths who punctured my tires, you might like to know that your actions prevented a senior citizen, me, from getting to his chemotherapy appointment on time. Now that's pretty sad, isn't it?
Wouldn't that make you angry that somebody has been inconvenience in that way. That's all about pathos. It pulls at your heart strings.
It makes you say, well, how could somebody do such a thing? So pathos then is a common kind of method of persuasion, and you see it in some kind of public arenas more than in others. So if you think, for instance, about the abortion debate, both sides of the abortion debate really focus on this with graphic images of babies being aborted. or fetuses as the other side would say, and then also the pro-choice people are saying, well what about the mother and we should have a kind of emotional relationship with that side of the story.
So those arguments are entirely based on pathos. And as a person, as a reader, you have to decide for yourself, what am I okay with? What is going to work for me?
Am I a person who is persuaded more by pathos than logos? Am I persuaded by ethos? Do I believe somebody before I even read what that person really says?
Those are all really important ethical questions, and so we can see that persuasion is not just about getting a result. But from the point of view of the reader, it's about really making sense of the world around you in a way that's fair and that's objective and that helps us out as a society. Now this last passage also has some examples of ethos.
So this is somebody who writes in a sort of awkward way, your actions prevented a senior citizen, me, from getting to his chemotherapy appointment. Why refer to yourself in the third person? What does that say about you? Is that an attempt to be clever, an attempt to sort of distance yourself from yourself? Why do that?
And why refer to these people as goths? Are they really goths, or is this a kind of senior citizens perspective? Those are again aspects of ethos, the way in which you present yourself through your writing style, through the different ticks that you might have. Okay, so those are a few examples of logos, ethos, and pathos in terms of writing.
Let's finish by just looking at some advertisements where we see the same kinds of rhetorical methods of persuasion. The next time you're traveling and you see billboards and advertisements or you're reading a magazine, let's say, with advertisements, play a little game and see if you can spot which method of persuasion is most on display in each case. So if you look at this classic kind of camel ad for cigarettes, what do you think is the method of persuasion here? Well, I would say that most of it has to do with ethos. This is the camel man.
This is the guy who wears khakis, who's always out in the wild, who is a little bit rough, and he smokes camels. And you should too if you want to have the same kind of image. That's ethos. It's entirely based on a particular personality or particular set of personal credentials. Now of course we know that smoking is bad for you, so there's a sort of problem of pathos perhaps in the background, but the dominant focus is on ethos.
The second one here, as I talked before about abortion arguments, many of them are based on pathos. In this case the ad says, excuse me America, this is tissue. This is not. So this is a kind of anti-abortion ad, and this one is not so much based on pathos. There's a bit of that because we see the picture of the baby, and there's an attempt to show that this is a picture that you should have emotions about, but it's primarily about logos.
It's a kind of argument that says, let's define the terminology. Let's talk about what tissue, what this word actually is, what a baby is, what a fetus is. We need to be clear about terminology, and I would say then that this is more about logos than it is about pathos, although that's certainly there as well.
And then we have one more here, and I would say that this one is definitely about pathos. Want to adopt a child? Well, how could you not after seeing this picture? Alright, so those are ethos, pathos, and logos. Try using them in your own writing and also try to discern them when you read other people's texts.