Your introduction is probably the single best opportunity for you to establish your ethos with this audience on this day. For this reason, you should always write your own introduction. Highlight the essential facts that establish your trustworthiness, similarity, authority, and reputation. As in the example above, pick the material specific to this audience and topic. Long introductions are boring. Example : Suppose you are delivering user training for employees to introduce the new corporate financial system.
Key items to highlight in your brief introduction might be:. Continue building your ethos through your presentation:. Example : Suppose you are trying to persuade your audience to support Habitat for Humanity , an international organization that builds homes to eliminate poverty. You can raise your ethos by crafting stories or anecdotes which demonstrate that you are active in the local Habitat chapter. By demonstrating that you follow your own advice, your audience is more likely to believe you on other points which cannot be so easily verified for example, statistics about Habitat for Humanity.
As well, I mean more than using words which are understood by the audience. To really get your audience to identify with you, you must use the terms that they would use to describe the concepts. For any given message, you have a multitude of options for stories, anecdotes, visuals, or other techniques to convey your speech. From this multitude, try selecting the ones which have the biggest impact with this audience. Not only will you get the big impact, but the audience will also start thinking that you are just like them.
Example : Suppose you are speaking to company management on the topic of goal-setting. Through audience analysis, you discovered that the company sponsored employees to run the local marathon. Although there are many metaphors and visuals you could use to talk about goal-setting, you choose to draw parallels between corporate goal-setting and the goals one sets when tackling a challenging race. You feature several vivid photographs of marathon races to complement your arguments.
Quotations and statistics are common speech tools which, on the surface, may contribute more to your logos logical argument than ethos. Nonetheless, if you choose the right sources, you can boost your ethos too.
Example : When researching a speech about cancer research, you discover two statistics that will help you make your argument. Which statistic is your audience more likely to believe?
When you reference a reputable source, you boost your ethos by association. So, the general guideline is to use quotations and statistics from sources which have high ethos to your audience, whether by trustworthiness, similarity, authority, or reputation. Earlier, we mentioned that, if possible, you should try to share the event experience with your audience. When you do, you can increase your ethos by incorporating something from that shared experience or someone in the audience into your speech.
Your talk is done, but your effectiveness as a speaker is not yet written in stone. Whenever possible, stick around after your presentation is over. Mingle with the audience and continue to share in the event experience. Not only will you have the opportunity for productive follow-up conversations, but your audience will see you as accessible, and accessible is good. If you fail to do so, your audience will judge you as being untrustworthy.
Even if your presentation was great, your influence on their future actions is diminished. In the above examples, you may have noticed that trustworthiness and similarity were mentioned much more often than authority or reputation. This is not an accident. This is one of many public speaking articles featured on Six Minutes. Subscribe to Six Minutes for free to receive future articles. E-Mail hidden. This article is full of useful tactics for improving your ethos in a speech and before and after.
What seems to be missing is that speakers need to show their hearts to audiences to truly connect with them. Hi Nick: The tactics in the article are not an exhaustive list.
There are other things one can do. If ethos is the ground on which your argument stands, logos is what drives it forward: it is the stuff of your arguments, the way one point proceeds to another, as if to show that the conclusion to which you are aiming is not only the right one, but so necessary and reasonable as to be more or less the only one. Think of this as the logic behind your argument. Aristotle had a tip here: He found that the most effective use of logos is to encourage your audience to reach the conclusion to your argument on their own, just moments before your big reveal.
They will relish in the fact that they were clever enough to figure it out, and the reveal will be that much more satisfying. The syllogism is a way of combining two premises and drawing a fresh conclusion that follows logically from them. The classic instance you always hear quoted is the following: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. While you need to take care with the syllogisms you use — false syllogisms can lead to obvious logical fallacies — they can be a powerful tool for helping your audience draw certain conclusions.
The best arguments are soaked in them. Any form of reasoning has to start from a set of premises, and in rhetoric those premises are very often commonplaces. There are three types of rhetorical appeals, or persuasive strategies, used in arguments to support claims and respond to opposing arguments.
A good argument will generally use a combination of all three appeals to make its case. Logos or the appeal to reason relies on logic or reason. Logos often depends on the use of inductive or deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning takes a specific representative case or facts and then draws generalizations or conclusions from them.
Inductive reasoning must be based on a sufficient amount of reliable evidence. In other words, the facts you draw on must fairly represent the larger situation or population. In this example the specific case of fair trade agreements with coffee producers is being used as the starting point for the claim. Because these agreements have worked the author concludes that it could work for other farmers as well.
Deductive reasoning begins with a generalization and then applies it to a specific case. The generalization you start with must have been based on a sufficient amount of reliable evidence. In this example the author starts with a large claim, that genetically modified seeds have been problematic everywhere, and from this draws the more localized or specific conclusion that Mexico will be affected in the same way. These are some common errors in reasoning that will undermine the logic of your argument.
Also, watch out for these slips in other people's arguments. Slippery slope: This is a conclusion based on the premise that if A happens, then eventually through a series of small steps, through B, C, If you have specific experience or education related to your issues, mention it in some way.
NOTE : Not all professors will be in favor of this, as it will depend upon the level of formality of the assignment, but, in general, this is an effective strategy. Writing Lab Menu open all close all. Sign in New account. Remember me. Log in.
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