Strategies for Persuasive Speaking

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It was Aristotle who first named the three means of persuasion or forms of rhetorical proof that comprise major persuasive speaking strategies. The first, appeals to ethos, concerns the qualifications and personality of the speaker; the second, appeals to logos, concerns the nature of the message in a speech; the third, appeals to pathos, concerns the nature of the audience’s feelings. According to Aristotle—and generations of theorists and practitioners who followed him—you can build an effective persuasive speech by incorporating a combination of these factors. We will examine each of these appeals in turn in addition to considering examples of problematic reasoning that undermine your effective use of ethos, logos, and pathos.