The syllogism is a way of combining two premises and drawing a fresh conclusion that follows logically from them. They will relish in the fact that they were clever enough to figure it out, and the reveal will be that much more satisfying.Īnother logos trick used often is the much abused syllogism. You want your points to seem so straightforward and commanding that your audience can’t conceive of an alternative.Īristotle had a tip here: He found that the most effective use of logos is to encourage your audience to reach the conclusion to your argument on their own, just moments before your big reveal. Think of this as the logic behind your argument. If ethos is the ground on which your argument stands, logos is what drives it forward: it is the stuff of your arguments, the way one point proceeds to another, as if to show that the conclusion to which you are aiming is not only the right one, but so necessary and reasonable as to be more or less the only one. Here’s how Leith describes logos, the next link in the chain: To head that off, it’s best to establish your ethos early on, both to give your attackers more of a challenge and to create a hook for your logos to hang on. You’ll even see a reverse ethos appeal at times, an attack on an opponent which questions their credentials and trustworthiness and serves to alienate them from the audience. ![]() Between two speakers with identical credentials, the more closely relatable one will win the audience. So if you’re a politician and you’re speaking about reforming the legal system, it’s great to be a lawyer or a judge, but it’s even better to be a lawyer or a judge who comes from the same community as your audience. You need your audience to believe that you are, in the well-known words, ‘A pretty straight kind of guy.’ Your audience needs to know (or to believe, which in rhetoric adds up to the same thing) that you are trustworthy, that you have a locus standi to talk on the subject, and that you speak in good faith. ![]() Ethos, when everything is stripped away, is about trust. And once you’ve established why you are an authority on the subject, you need to build rapport. It’s the verbal equivalent of all those degrees hanging up in your doctor’s office. The first part of ethos is establishing your credentials to be speaking to the audience on the specific subject matter. Leith has a great example for summarizing what the three look like.Įthos: ‘Buy my old car because I’m Tom Magliozzi.’ Logos: ‘Buy my old car because yours is broken and mine is the only one on sale.’ Pathos: ‘Buy my old car or this cute little kitten, afflicted with a rare degenerative disease, will expire in agony, for my car is the last asset I have in the world, and I am selling it to pay for kitty’s medical treatment.’ Ethos (In other words, your moving speech on why we all need to take a social media holiday may not resonate at the Twitter shareholder meeting.)Įthos is about establishing your authority to speak on the subject, logos is your logical argument for your point and pathos is your attempt to sway an audience emotionally. Without that grounding, you’re already setting yourself up for failure. If there is one theme that resonates throughout Leith’s book, it’s that you must know your audience their interests, prejudices and expectations. This research phase should not be limited to the subject matter, it should also include your audience. ![]() ![]() Invention is doing your homework: thinking up in advance exactly what arguments can be made both for and against a given proposition, selecting the best on your own side, and finding counterarguments to those on the other. This phase is referred to as invention, but it’s not about making something up, it’s more about the information gathering or research phase of your work. How? By doing the work required to have an opinion. So using Sam Leith’s Words Like Loaded Pistols as our guide, let’s discuss Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.īut before we get into the specifics of the three modes, we need to decide on the structure of our argument itself. Not only is it an incredibly valuable skill to have, it’s important to know how you’re being persuaded when you’re a part of the audience. The structure of a great oral argument has been passed down through the ages, starting with Aristotle. Any fool can start it, but to end it requires considerable skill.”
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