Topic Summaries

There are three main ways you can target your audience in order to persuade them. The first is pathos, which covers appeals to passion and emotion. The second is ethos, which is about ethics and credibility. The third is logos, which is to do with logic and rationality.

To use pathos, you need to appeal to the audience’s feelings. Try to elicit sympathy, galvanise anger, or provide inspiration, depending on what best suits your issue. An easy way to do this while delivering your speech is to pretend you are feeling these emotions while reading out your own words.

To use ethos, you need to establish some sense of justice or injustice. No one likes it when things are unfair, so if there is some kind of unfairness or inequality involved in your issue, point that out and make your audience understand how awful it is. This works well when you are introducing a problem and then persuading your audience that your proposed solution will address this problem.

To use logos, you need to lay things out logically and take your audience through a step-by-step train of thought. This is particularly effective when it creates a ‘snowballing’ effect (i.e. you start with one idea, and then add more and more arguments like a snowball rolling down a hill getting bigger and bigger, until you end with an overwhelming conclusion that seems undeniable because of how logically you’ve explained it!).