The Aristotelian view

Almost 2400 years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle created his treatise on Rhetoric - a set of three books that versed on all aspects of public speaking and considered even nowadays the fundamental guide on how to be a great orator and deliver persuasive speeches.

Many sites host an English translation of the book (the MIT classics archive is one of them, for example), and it's recommended that you give it a read if you have the time.

Very early in the treatise, Aristotle introduces the three pillars that every persuasive speech should have:

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word, there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.

These three components receive the following names:

• Ethos - Everything related to your internal attributes as a person and how trustworthy and credible you come across.
• Pathos -  Everything related to emotions and the imagery that you create in the mind of the audience
• Logos - Everything related to the logical arguments used in the speech.

Note that these are not organizational elements of the speech. You shouldn't think that a speech should have "an ethos section, a pathos section,..". Instead, these should be elements that should permeate your speech in all of its sections.

Ethos

Ethos is usually associated with four basic characteristics of the speaker:

• Trustworthiness
• Similarity to the audience
• Authority
• Reputation, knowledge, and expertise

As a speaker, part of your effectiveness in persuading comes from your credibility and your trustworthiness. Even before you open your mouth, you start with a certain initial amount of it based on the image that the audience has about you. This image may come from the prior knowledge that they already have (your public persona if you're well known) or from the introduction that you're given.

Credibility is not something that is constant - during the speech, your credibility may increase or decrease depending on the resources you use.  We've all probably heard the common tongue-in-cheek dating observation made by a friend ...  "he was so handsome, but when he opened his mouth....".  That's not only a joke - research does show that attractiveness gives you an extra boost in initial credibility, but that is only good enough to open the door for you.

In the Agora Educational Program (both in our activities and the project paths), you'll see that we frequently warn about things that may "decrease your credibility" (for example - engaging in fallacious reasoning, lacking focus in your speech, lacking a clear structure or simply having too many hesitations and word parasites).

The importance of Ethos is such that if your credibility is high, you can get away with giving the occasional bad speech.

There are many ways to establish your credibility:

• Through credentials (but not during the speech - in the event posters, agendas, by way of the introduction, etc.)
• Through achievements (e.g., companies you created, papers that you published, products you built, prizes you got awarded, etc.)
• Through personal experience (e.g., you have authority to speak about Tibet because you've lived there for 10 years)
• Through extensive media presence (running blogs, videos, articles in newspapers, TV and radio appearances, etc.)
• Through displayed knowledge (theoretical or even practical) during the speech.
• Through confidence in handling issues, interruptions, disturbances, and questions from the audience. (e.g., by remaining calm when faced with a disturbance, by answering an unexpected question knowledgeably. For more information, check this specific article.)
• By leaning on the credibility of others - by using quotes, testimonials, references, endorsements, etc.
• Sometimes, simply being around credible people gives you an extra initial amount of credibility. For example, if your pictures show you constantly surrounded by Nobel-prize winners, people will attach higher initial credibility to you.

Establishing Similarity to the audience is another element you should have in mind when working on your Ethos. In the Basic Educational Program, we have a specific project where you're asked to research your audience and tailor your speech to it. This includes:

• Highlighting the things you have in common with the members of the audience
• Choosing the appropriate quotes, references, and stories
• Choosing the appropriate arguments
• Establishing physical rapport by adjusting your attire, vocal characteristics, expressions, and general language to those of the audience.

Pathos

Pathos refers to the emotional content of the speech. There's ample research that people, in general, are persuaded and act mainly based on emotional appeal rather than cold logic.  It requires very specific training to let go of your emotions and gut feelings and act solely based on data and logic.

In one very famous report (later described in his book Descartes' Error), renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied a patient who had part of his brain's frontal lobe removed due to a tumor. The frontal lobe is responsible for expressing and modulating all core emotions we experience, including especially empathy. This particular patient, before the operation, had been a very successful and happily married businessman. After the operation, despite preserving all his reasoning and thinking capacity and same high IQ, Damasio discovered that he could not make any kind of decisions - not even simple things like choosing what to eat or classifying documents.

This doesn't mean  that people act only on emotion, but that emotion is a fundamental and necessary factor in decision-making.

Paradoxically enough, many times, speakers fake their real emotions (for example, they present a fake feeling of sadness instead of displaying the real sadness that they feel) because they're afraid of opening up and being vulnerable in front of the audience. Actually, it's the opposite - displaying your true feelings about something can only help both your emotional appeal and your perception as someone authentic and genuine.

Even if you open up, don't expect everyone to feel the same way as you. Your sadness about children missing their childhood due to child labor or your frustration with climate change inaction or anger at police brutality will not necessarily resonate with every audience member.

There are different ways in which you can increase the Pathos component in your speech. In fact, a great part of the Basic Educational Path and other Agora Educational activities are devoted precisely to practicing those approaches:

• Be authentic and open about the way you feel.
• Use vocal variety - This should come naturally when you openly express your feelings (In fact, one of the reasons why Damasio was able to detect that his patient lacked the ability to feel emotions is since he spoke in a detached and monotonous way about major events in his life, such as losing his long-held job or divorce)
• Use the right body language.
• Use vivid imagery and use sensory words.
• Use rhetorical devices, especially triads, metaphors, and analogies.
• Use humor, anecdotes, and stories (especially if they're personal)
• Elicit the emotions directly - especially surprise, awe, disgust, etc. (Which has another positive effect: Research shows (e,g: here, or here) that people learn and retain information better if it is conveyed while they're in a non-extreme emotional state).

Logos

Logos represents the argumentational facet of the speech. Where Pathos was the "appeal to emotion", Logos represents the "appeal to reason".

How solid the arguments presented are, how coherent the reasoning is, how sound the data or evidence is.

Logos is achieved by:

• Guiding your audience through a logical chain reaching the intended conclusion
• Providing solid evidence or data
• Providing examples of success or a track record

The first point will usually involve a set of deductive or inductive arguments.

Deductive reasoning is used when you start from a series of premises accepted to be true, and then through the rules of logic, you arrive at a specific conclusion. For example, "A majority of the population thinks that sweetened carbonated drinks are bad for our health. If we position our new beverage as a carbonated drink, people will not buy it". As you can see in this example, not always the full premises or elements of the logical sequence are explicitly verbalized - specifically, the implicit premise of "people don't buy things they consider bad for their health" is used but not verbalized.  We will speak much more about logic in the Critical Thinking Educational Path.

Ideally, all premises should be objective, indisputable facts ("The Earth is a planet, We have 23 pairs of chromosomes, the GDP of Spain in 2019 was  1394 billion dollars"). However, if we limit the premises to only that, we would be forced to limit our speeches to stating that "Socrates is a man" (the archetypical example proposition in every second article that explains syllogisms).

A second-best option is starting from premises that both you as a speaker and the audience agree on. Imagine that you want to give a speech about protecting the environment, and you want to use deductive reasoning. In front of a Catholic congregation,  it would be pretty safe to assume that no one will question the premise that "God exists" and that "God created the Earth". Therefore, you can start a logical chain that spans reasons that we're tarnishing God's work that he entrusted to us by trashing the environment.
The same approach wouldn't do so well in front of a convention of economists, for example. A more suitable premise there would be that "Extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods, and fires cause massive economic losses and disruptions in the market.".

A distant third case would be premises on which the audience doesn't have a formed opinion nor counterexamples, and you can present them as truths that can be accepted easily. For example, "A study done by Johnson et al. shows that 85% of the population thinks that carbonated drinks are bad for health". If the audience isn't well versed in this particular field, they may accept the claim of the study at face value, and you may use it in your reasoning chain. However, it may very well happen otherwise with a different audience that contains experts. Someone might question the validity of the study. Someone might question the moment when it was made and whether it was still applicable today. Someone might question that everyone understands something different by "carbonated drinks".

On the other hand, inductive reasoning is when you make a generalization based on enough individual observations. For example, "I get tired if I don't drink coffee" (generalizes a series of past experiences) or "there have been a lot of accidents with this new type of aircraft. I think it's better to avoid it".

This doesn't mean that induction is always risky. in fact, there are many ways to do induction in science so that the conclusion is valid.

Sometimes logos can be achieved even if the audience doesn't understand what you're talking about. Still, the mere serious demeanor, together with a combination of a lot of complex-sounding words, can create the necessary illusion.

In fact, this is not much different from the techniques that many successful crackpots use nowadays, with physics and quantum mechanics being a favorite target.

In the Basic Educational Program, we work on Logos in three of the projects:

• Presentation Software
• Argumentative Speeches
• Researching a Topic.

The Sophist view

The Sophists (from the Greek σοφιστής, sophistes, in turn from sophia - wisdom)  were collectively a class of intellectuals or experts in their fields that traveled the towns and taught their knowledge and skills in exchange for payment.  Condemnation by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle - who considered them to be unworthy and a little more than snake-oil sellers, capable of defending both one viewpoint and the opposite - caused their writings to all but disappear in history.

(Does this conflict between for-free and for-pay education ring a bell in modern times? Consider that the first Sophists are considered to be from around 500 B.C. - more than 2500 years ago)

Still, some of their ideas are preserved - especially in the field of public speaking - which was one of the most popular skills they taught and became almost a synonym with sophism by the time of the Roman Empire.

The Sophists also had their three pillars for what constituted a good persuasive speech:

• Kairos - Everything related to the timeliness of the speech
• Prepon - Everything related to the appropriateness of the speech (both in terms of audience and occasion)
• Dynaton - Everything related to presenting the desired final state towards which the speaker wants the audience to move.

Kairos

Kairos refers to the moment when the speech is given. Sophists believed that speeches needed to be given at the right moment, otherwise, they would lack persuasive effectiveness. One of the most famous sophists - Gorgias, considered that prepared speeches violated that principle - that every successful speaker should be able to speak without notes and extemporaneously.

Prepon

Prepon refers to the appropriateness of the speech to the audience and the environment in which it is presented. It's complementary to the Kairos facet. Although you could think that this is somewhat similar to the similarity with the audience facet of the Ethos, prepon also involves awareness of all other elements in the environment - from acoustics to lighting to temperature. Just as in the case of Kairos, achieving Prepon means both studying the environment beforehand (in the Agora project about Knowing your Audience, we insist on the need of visiting the venue where you will be speaking beforehand in order to know it thoroughly), and also adapting the speech to that environment and to whatever circumstances may arise during the presentation.

Dynaton

Finally, Dynaton refers to the dimension of the possible - the feasibility of the state that the speaker wants to be achieved. In the Speech Structure project, we cover different organizational speech structures, and one of the most popular is the so-called Monroe's Motivated Sequence. One of the key elements of that structure is the contrast between what is "now" and what "could be" (for example - a description of the current climate situation vs. how the world would look if we took care of the environment). Dynaton not only describes that "could be" state but must also persuade that it is achievable and not some wild fantasy.