Trap One: Lines That Pull Two Levers at Once
Real speech is rarely tidy. A personal story leans on the speaker's character and tugs your heart — that's ethos and pathos in the one breath. “Forty thousand hectares burned last summer” is a cold fact (logos) that also lands like a punch (pathos). You won't always get a clean single answer.
Say it plainly: when a line blends appeals, name the dominant one — the lever doing most of the lifting — and note the second. “Mainly pathos, with a logos backbone.”
Trap Two: Appeals That Cheat
Each lever has a dodgy twin, and naming them makes you much harder to con:
- Faked ethos — borrowed authority. A celebrity in a lab coat selling vitamins has no real credibility on medicine. Ask: are they actually an authority on this?
- Manipulative pathos — feeling with nothing behind it. Fear-mongering, guilt-tripping, a sad-puppy ad. The feeling is real; the reason to act may be missing.
- Faulty logos — numbers that don't mean what they seem. “Nine out of ten people agree” (out of how many? agree to what?). Dodgy stats are logos wearing a disguise.
Exam-saver: when you analyse an appeal, don't just name it — judge it. Say which appeal, how it positions the responder, and whether it's fair or manipulative. That last step is where the marks (and the wisdom) live.
The Quiet One: Timing (kairos)
The Greeks had a fourth word — kairos, the right moment. The perfect appeal at the wrong time falls flat: crack a joke at a funeral, or rattle off statistics to a grieving crowd, and watch it die. Reading the moment is part of the craft.