#Ethos pathos logos meaning code

Using pathos in content creation relies upon an audience’s ability to empathize with your message, story, or ad. You’re appealing to people’s emotions by featuring material that will cause particular emotional reactions: fear, sadness, anger, etc. Pathos is audience manipulation, pure and simple. We don’t create content in vacuums (the “rhetorical tetrahedron” goes more into context, if you want to read up), so how we write scripts, create ads, and appear on social media is a constant back-and-forth that alternates what we emphasize at which point of the content experience. So, the rhetorical triangle is talking about you, your project, and your audience - and how the whole relationship either works or doesn’t. Image via Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Warner Bros.). Collecting actual historical figures for your high school presentation would be an excellent use of ethos.

Socrates taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who gave us the foundations of rhetoric (and the need for this post). Ethos represents you and your credibility or trustworthiness as the creator of a specific project.Logos represents your project itself and your project’s appeal to reason (things making sense).Pathos represents your audience and your project’s appeal to their emotions.The three “appeals” of the rhetorical triangle work independently and in unison to create compelling arguments that will lead audiences to particular conclusions. The influence of ancient Greek law, politics, and poetry on the development of western civilization is. Add in grammar and logic, and you have the three ancient arts on discourse, which guided the development of ancient Greek law, politics, and poetry. In it, he lays down some ground rules on the art of persuasion (rhetoric). This creates trust for the showrunners, and deploys logos to improve the authority of the story itself (image via USA Network).įirst, fun facts for your next dinner party: the rhetorical triangle - or “rhetorical appeals,” or “means of persuasion,” or even “rhetorical tetrahedron” (!) - comes from Rhetoric, Aristotle’s famous treatise from the 4th century BCE.

#Ethos pathos logos meaning code

Robot used ethos to lead perceptive viewers to a “realistic” or “believable” conclusion about how they were telling the story - a key to narrative success for stories of this kind - by keeping the code used by hackers throughout the series accurate. Let’s take a moment to define the terms and how they work, with a few examples in action that have been right under your nose. Rhetoric, the discipline where we find these means of persuasion, is more interesting than it sounds. Those conclusions might be something like feel this way about this story, or decide to buy this product, or believe the moon landing was fake.Įven if you haven’t been considering these concepts in the development of your film or video projects, they’ve been there, lurking beneath the surface and classifying what you’ve been doing. Every project - be it creative, corporate, or informative - relies on these three means of persuasion to make its point and lead the audience to a conclusion or series of conclusions. The rhetorical triangle ties together three concepts from the world of classical rhetoric - pathos, logos, and ethos. Here’s how understanding pathos, logos, and ethos will improve your film and video projects.

Leading your audience to a particular conclusion is an art unto itself - a classical art, at that.