We’ll be working on our newspaper assignments today, and I just wanted to remind you guys that while stringing together the words is fun, we still need to appeal to our readers in a few key ways.

Rhetoric is the art of arguing. And arguing has been around since the very first two people began speaking.

Another way of saying arguing is persuading. Nothing makes a piece more memorable than changing a way a person thinks. If you can persuade a person, you will be a great writer.

How do we persuade people?

 

Well, lucky for us, humans have been arguing so long that over the centuries we’ve turned it into an art form. There are three basic ways to persuade your reader.

1. Logos – This is appealing to a person’s Logic. How do we use logic to persuade a person?

 

 

 

2. Pathos – This is appealing to a person’s emotions. How do we persuade a person with emotions?

 

 

3. Ethos – This is appealing to a person’s sense of ethics, or maybe you can say authenticity or tradition. You can use institutional rules, your own experience, or somehow qualify yourself as a subject matter expert in your reader’s mind. How would you go about this?

 

Now, try to do all three of these things in everything you write. When you are strengthening your point with ethos, pathos, and logos, you can’t lose.

Or maybe you can. Persuade me.