These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Rhetoric is a 2500-year-old system of studying the effective use of language. Rhetoric is divided into five canons of knowledge: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.
In this class, we are going to concern ourselves first with Invention, which is the process of finding the available means of persuasion. Within Invention, we find various means for persuading an audience, including ethos, pathos, logos, and kairos.
Ethos is the speaker's authority, character, and credibility. Generally, we want our ethos to illustrate our connection to an audience, our good will towards that audience, our honesty or integrity, and our knowledge of the subject.
Pathos is the use of emotion in persuasion (this is the emotion the writer/rhetor would like to inspire in an audience).
Logos is the use of logic and reason (also expressed in things like "facts," graphs, charts, numbers, etc.).
Kairos is the use of urgency in writing (example: in an argument against the death penalty, you talk about the accused person who will be executed in the morning).
Today we're going to focus on ethos...how even the simplist messages reflect the character of the writer.
Situated ethos is the ethos you bring with you to a situation. For example, Martha Stewart has a lot of situated ethos when it comes to baking cakes. She doesn't need to explain why her recipe will be the best because we already know her and know that she is an expert baker.
Invented ethos is the ethos you create in a situation or discourse. For example, Martha Stewart has no ethos with regards to American foreign policy. If she were to address our foreign policy, she would first have to show us why we should even bother listening to her. She might do this by telling us about her graduate degrees in history and political science, her years spent working for the UN, and her appointment to the diplomatic corps. In other words, Stewart would have to use at least part of her time with us proving that she knows her stuff. Academics do this, frequently, with a brief "review of literature" on a particular topic, illustrating that they've read all of the important works on the topic they are writing about.
These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.