Ethos, Pathos, Logos

Your Morals - Your Heart - Your Mind.

Today in my Expo class we were discussing the Rhetorical Triangle and how authors have to focus on audience in order to ultimately achieve their purpose. I was talking about devices that authors use in order to achieve these goals and talked about Ethos, Pathos and Logos.

Now I would love to say that I too learned about these things in high school but sadly, I did not. I wish I had because it would have made College a lot easier. I had professors talking about Pathos all the time and I had no clue what they were talking about. So slowly I was able to figure out what was going on and with the help of a little thing called the Internet off I went!

So today when I had a student who raised their hand and asked the question "thethos, mathos what?" I took the time to provide them with a 'teachable moment' - we took about 10 minutes to explain what the words mean and how authors use them to produce an emotion from their audience.

So for those of us who have forgotten or maybe never covered this in HS.

Logos - appeal to Logic - encourages the audience to think
Pathos - appeal to emotions - encourages the audience to have emotions
Ethos - establishing credibility - appealing to the ethical views of the audience