Rhetorical Appeals: The Available Means of Persuasion Aristotle defined Rhetoric as the available means of persuasion. But what are these available means? Think about it this way: what are the various ways that people try to get us to agree with their assertions? It boils down to a few basic principles: ethos, logos, pathos, kairos. Why does it matter what we call these appeals? Because we need to have a common language to describe the many ways people try to get us to agree with them or to do what they want us to do. Their goal might be to get us to buy a new kind of shower gel or to think differently about American education but, either way, texts have a few basic tools at their disposal. What are those tools? Ethos: Ethos is fundamental to any attempt to persuade because it is appeals to character. There are two basic ways that people use ethos. 1. Ethos as an attempt to establish credibility. This is an attempt to appeal to readers trust of authority. A writer/speaker/seller can use your trust in authority to convince you that her argument or product is worthwhile because she is an expert. A writer might do that by saying, I m a doctor and I ve studied obesity in children for ten years. A writer can also establish authority simply by sounding reasonable. Here s an example from Stephen Johnson who wrote a letter to Senator Hillary Clinton in 2005. I m writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent week against the notorious Grand Theft Auto series. Now, I may or may not know anything about Mr. Johnson, but so far he sounds like a reasonable guy. His tone is even, and he gets straight to the point. He s no-nonsense. As the letter goes on, we ll find out that he s not, in fact, writing to commend Senator Clinton, but to disagree with her. But we don t know that yet. And so far, one sentence in to the letter, we get a good vibe from the guy. We begin, tentatively, to like him. Ahh like him. And therefore to be slightly, even just a tiny bit, more open to whatever argument he s about to make. 2. Ethos as an attempt to establish one s own credibility by drawing on the authority of others. This appeal works in two ways: first, by demonstrating that your argument is credible because you are not the only one who thinks this way and second, because the people who agree with you are authorities. They are credible sources and therefore, you are a credible source. This kind of appeal to Ethos can easily be seen in writers who cite experts. Let s return to Johnson s letter. According to Duke University s Child Well-Being Index, he writes, today s kids are less violent than kids have been at any time since the study began in 1975. So it s not just Johnson who s saying that children are actually less violent since the release of
Grand Theft Auto, Duke University is saying it also. So Johnson is in good company. Is Duke University credible? Of course. Citing a credible source in turn makes Johnson more credible. Okay. Let s see Ethos in action. Watch this: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like This ad uses humor to sell a product. But it also uses appeals to ethos. What are these appeals to ethos? Remember that first, ethos is appeals to character. So, who is this character? Well, we don t know him and, via a YouTube video, we can t smell him, so why would we be convinced that just because he tells us that he smells good that he does, in fact, smell good? What do we know about him? He s muscular, and (the ad implies) unlike our man, he has a boat, two tickets to that thing we like (who are we? Women, according to this ad), diamonds, and finally, a trusty white steed. So who is he? In this ad, he is the man of every woman s dreams. Unlike our man, he smells good, and he wants to do romantic things with us. He is, in fact, a romantic myth. But, he s a romantic myth we recognize. Every woman (according to this ad) wants a man who smells good, who buys tickets, brings diamonds, has a boat and a white horse. So first we (the women the ad is trying to sell to) trust him because we recognize him as The Romantic Myth. Second, we like him because he (or at least the ad) is funny. The second way the ad uses Ethos is in establishing the character of the company. After we see this ad, ideally, we will associate Old Spice not with seventy-year old men who use Old Spice aftershave to cover up the smell of the cigars they have been smoking, but with a young, muscular, funny guy. The ad uses Ethos in an attempt to use the character of the man to improve our idea of the character of the company. We think of Old Spice, we think of this funny ad, we have a positive association, mission accomplished. ETHOS = character & credibility
Logos Logos includes any appeals to logic, or reason. There are two basic kinds of appeals to logic. 1. Logos as an appeal to our desire for hard evidence. Uses of statistics, facts, figures, studies, are all appeals to logic. We tend to think of logic as factual, but remember that any study is open to interpretation; one person might interpret the numbers one way, another person might see those statistics from a different angle. That s why logic is considered a kind of appeal: the writer is trying to get us to see the facts in a certain way: his way. Of course, the strength of a logical appeal is that we can look at the original study and decide for ourselves. Here s a quote from Malcolm Gladwell s essay, The Tipping Point. The anti-smoking movement has never been louder or more prominent. Yet all signs suggest that among the young the anti-smoking message is backfiring. Between 1993 and 1997, the number of college students who smoke jumped 32 percent. Since 1988, in fact, the total number of teen smokers in the United States has risen an extraordinary 73 percent. In this passage, we can see that he is using facts to support his idea that the anti-smoking campaign isn t working. How? The numbers show that in spite of the anti-smoking campaign, the number of young smokers has actually risen. How can we argue with numbers? (well we probably could. But we won t do so here.) 2. Logos as an appeal to general reason. In using this appeal, writers try to lead us, step by step, through their way of thinking. A writer begins with a premise, or a statement that she wants her readers to agree with. Then, using logic, she takes her readers step by step from the premise to her conclusion. If readers accept her premise and follow her argument step by step, then readers will be willing to accept her conclusion and, therefore, agree with her argument. Let s look at an example. Premise: Education is important. One of the key factors in quality education is the teacher. We should try to recruit and keep the best teachers in our state. Many teachers in our state leave for higher paying jobs in Wyoming and Nevada. If teacher salaries in Utah were higher, equal to the wages in Wyoming and Nevada, perhaps some of those teachers would not leave. We should raise teacher salaries in order to retain good teachers and increase the quality of education. LOGOS = logic, facts & reason
Pathos Pathos includes appeals to shared values and to emotions. 1. Pathos as appeals to shared values. If a writer wants to convince people to spend more money on education (to return to the example above), he needs to draw on shared values. One of those shared values is education. In our culture, we value education and the role of education in the American dream. So anyone making an argument about education would be wise to draw on that value. So one of the first things a writer might do in developing his argument would be to use how we feel about education. 2. Pathos as appeals to emotion. A writer can draw on any emotion he feels will help persuade people to be sympathetic to his argument. This might include appealing to positive feelings, such as love or compassion, but it can also include appeals to negative emotions, such as fear or anger. We can all think of examples where a politician used appeals to fear to try to convince us to vote for him and not the other guy. An appeal like that might include a warning that if we don t do whatever he thinks we should do, bad things will happen. Examples include: if we don t spend more money on the war on terror, terrorists will come to our town; or if we don t spend more money on education, we ll be left behind as China becomes the most powerful economy. Appeals to positive emotions, such as sympathy or compassion, might include examples of individuals affected by a specific issue. So a story about John Smith, who lost his job when he got cancer, might be used to elicit sympathy, and then the writer might use that sympathy to make a case for health care. PATHOS = shared value and emotions
Kairos Kairos includes appeals to time and place. We can think of Kairos as specific conditions, something happening now, that make a specific argument possible. We can think of Kairos as the opportune moment to make an argument. A good example is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. s I Have A Dream speech. That speech was given on August 28, 1963. King s speech would not have been possible even a few years before. The momentum of the Civil Rights Movement, the election of JFK three years before, all of these things created an environment, a context, in which King could make a certain argument. When we think about the place he gave that argument, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, we can see that the location also had a persuasive effect on the audience, an effect we still feel today if we watch film of the speech. He stands in our nation s capitol and tries to persuade us about issues of freedom and democracy. The place, the seat of our government, adds to the appeal of his words. 1. Kairos as an appeal to time. Many arguments are possible because of the historic time in which they are made. Certain arguments against nuclear power would not have been possible during the 1970s. Certain arguments being made now about clean nuclear power would not have been possible in the 1980s, in the wake of Chernobyl disaster. Arguments against the use of nuclear weapons certainly were different after Hiroshima. 2. Kairos as an appeal to place. Sometimes the location of the argument adds to its persuasive effects. In the example of King s speech, the location, in Washington, DC, lends some weight to the ideas he s invoking. Sometimes the right place can make an argument more persuasive. Think about how persuasive a speech about the effects of terrorism would be when given in front of the rubble of the towers. Now think about the same speech given in the Senate chambers. Both might be persuasive, but given in front of a site of terrorism, a Senator s speech would have the added force of a physical location. KAIROS= time and place