1. Rhetorical Strategies: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
By Diana Lucas

2. Ethos Ethos=credibility, or showing your character as a writer
When writers invoke ethos, they show that they are trustworthy and that what they have to say is valid
Similar to authorizing
Writers often appeal to ethos by establishing the worth of the sources that they use
Ethos also includes acknowledging the worth of what others have to say, whether or not you agree or disagree with them

3. Ethos example Nat Hentoff, “Free Speech on Campus” (1989):
“Who decides what speech can be heard or read by everyone? Why, the Chancellor, of course. That’s what George III used to say, too.
University of Wisconsin political science professor Carol Tebben thinks otherwise. She believes university administrators “are getting confused when they are acting as censors and trying to protect students from bad ideas. I think they can determine for themselves what ideas are bad.”
After all, if students are to be “protected” from bad ideas, how are they going to learn to identify and cope with them? Sending such ideas underground simply makes them stronger and more dangerous.”

4. Pathos Pathos=appeal to emotion
Writers use pathos to grab the reader’s attention and to move the reader through their emotions
To appeal to pathos, writers often tell stories, relate a shocking fact or use figurative language, such as metaphor
Statistical data can also function as an appeal to pathos:
E.g. “There are only a few thousand Bengal Tigers left in the wild, due to poaching and the destruction of their natural habitat.”

5. Example of Pathos
Doug Levitt, “Our Disparity Disorder: Life on the Wage Floors” (Huffington Post, March 4, 2015):
“There are minimum legal wages and there are – or should be –minimum morally-legal wages…I think of the vet who, after being in a coma for a month from an IED in Iraq, returned to his native North Carolina and began working at a Taco Bell; the single mom at the Dollar General in Missouri who could barely buy diapers for her two-year-old daughter.  The station workers and security guards, housekeepers and motel clerks; overnight shelf-stockers, like the working mom with aching feet at a Walmart in Inglewood, California, living on the edge of eviction.”

6. Logos Logos=appeal to reason
Writers appeal to logos when they show that they are able to make logical claims.
Composing a well-organized argument is an appeal to logos.

7. Logos Example
Tori Rodriguez, “Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones” (Scientific American Mind, Vol. 26, Issue 2, Feb. 12, 2015):
“It is not completely clear why survivors produce less cortisol, but Yehuda's team recently found that survivors also have low levels of an enzyme that breaks down cortisol. The adaptation makes sense: reducing enzyme activity keeps more free cortisol in the body, which allows the liver and kidneys to maximize stores of glucose and metabolic fuels—an optimal response to prolonged starvation and other threats. The younger the survivors were during World War II, the less of the enzyme they have as adults. This finding echoes the results of many other human epigenetic studies that show that the effects of certain experiences during childhood and adolescence are especially enduring in individuals and sometimes even across generations (right).”