Rhetorical tactics are used to persuade audiences and can be classified as relating to ethos, pathos, or logos. Pathos appeals to emotions, ethos adds credibility, and logos uses logic. Examples include personification, exemplum, and syllogisms.
Many rhetorical tactics are used by writers, advertisers and politicians to get listeners or readers to accept the arguments they make. The most basic way to subdivide rhetorical tactics is to classify them as relating to ethos, pathos, or logos. Ethos refers to the credibility, trustworthiness and character of the writer or speaker and can be appealed to using tactics such as the exemplum. Pathos is an appeal to the listener’s emotions, which may use techniques such as personification. Finally, logos is the use of logic to create arguments or point out errors within an opponent’s reasoning, often done through the use of syllogisms, a logical tactic.
There are several rhetorical tactics, which can usually be classified as relating to pathos, ethos or logos. Tactics are otherwise called rhetorical devices and are essentially techniques that are used to appeal to the audience and make them agree or disagree with the proposed argument. For example, a politician may use hyperbole to exaggerate problems with another politician’s policies, thereby eliciting an emotional response and pathos from the public.
Pathos is a group of rhetorical tactics that appeal to the emotions of listeners or readers. The goal is to create an emotional response in the audience that encourages them to agree with the point of the argument. For example, a politician trying to gain power may use the personification tactic to describe the state of the country in a more emotional way. He or she might say “the country lies bleeding, sick and forlorn on the cold floor, and my opponent refuses to admit it,” to elicit an emotional response from the audience.
Ethos is another group of rhetorical tactics commonly used to add credibility to an argument or remove it. It focuses specifically on the qualities of the speaker, as opposed to the content of the topic being presented. Ethos tactics, such as the exemplum, allow the speaker to shift attention from the actual content of the discussion to the qualities of the person proposing the argument. For example, a politician may use exemplum – Latin for “an example” – to show how his opponent has lied in the past to discredit what he is saying. This could be done by saying “this is coming from my opponent, who promised to lower all taxes before he was elected, but then raised income taxes on his first day in office”.
Logos is the last group of rhetorical tactics and focuses on pointing out logical flaws in an opponent’s argument or creating perfectly logical arguments. Any tactic that makes use of logic, such as a syllogism, can fall under the logos type. For example, an advertisement may implicitly or explicitly state the hypothetical syllogism: “If you have bad breath, then nobody will like you. If you use product X, you won’t get bad breath, so if you use product X, people will like you.” This is phrased as a syllogism, or three-part argument, which adds credibility, but also contains an error which an opponent may point to to counter the argument.
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