These forms of persuasion help actors sell their characters immensely. Pathos can be expressed by actors through language, emotional tones, or emotional events/scenes. Actors appealing to pathos aim to generate a certain emotion or response. Actors may attempt to evoke sympathy so the audience feels how the director intended for them to feel. Pathos is the emotional appeal, meaning to convince an audience through appealing on emotional levels.
An actor may appeal to logos by presenting logical or well-rounded arguments, may cite important information, or may refer to historical analogies for explanations and proof.
When appealing to logos, an actor may cite facts or statistics to prove their points. Logos is the appeal to logic, meaning to convince the audience by using logic or reason. They may choose to make ethical decisions as their character would, and even dress frugally as their character would to better understand their character’s lifestyle.
If an actor was working on how to appeal to ethos, they may try studying their character out of rehearsal and off-stage. An actor would use ethos to prove to his audience that he’s credible and worth listening to by presenting their ethical opinions and making ethical decisions. Ethos: Appealing to EthicsĮthos is the ethical appeal, and it means to convince an audience of the author’s credibility or character by showing a good sense of ethics. Read on to learn more about the three classic modes of persuasion. To successfully persuade, actors have been looking upon these three appeals for quite some time. They are reliable methods that actors learn to use to their advantage. Ethos, logos, and pathos are used to create a more authentic and credible personality. In theater, persuasion is most effective through a person’s character: their ethics, their logic, their emotion, and their ability to sympathize.Īn actor on stage has the responsibility of being believable or credible. As actors are learning various acting styles, techniques, and methods, they are introduced to these three modes of persuasion. These are used in theatre, in literature, and beyond. Clinton speaks about the rights of women around the world.Aristotle coined the terms ethos, logos, and pathos as the three main tools of persuasion. We can see an example of how these three types of appeal interact in a speech by former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the fourth World Conference of the United Nations. Pathos: The speaker appeals to the audience’s emotions, using emotional language, sensory images, and anecdotes. The speaker also tries to build a bridge to the audience by using first-person plural pronouns (we, us). Logos: The speaker appeals to the audience’s sense of reason, using logic, facts, and statistics.Įthos: The speaker tries to show the audience that he or she is reliable, credible, and trustworthy.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) described three appeals that can be used to persuade an audience: ethos, pathos, and logos. To be persuasive, the speaker must take the audience into consideration and appeal to them in ways that will convince them. You can think of a speech as a rhetorical triangle such as the one below. We will examine the impact of rhetorical structure and devices.Ī speech, no matter the subject, requires a speaker, an audience, and a purpose. The focus of this guide will be persuasive speeches, those that are intended to sway the audience to agree with the speaker. A speaker may aim to inspire or to motivate, to amuse, to inform or to persuade. A speech is an address given to an audience for a variety of purposes.