Rhetorical Appeals: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
Rhetorical Appeals: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
When someone tries to convince you of something, they are not just handing you facts and hoping you agree. They are making choices about how to reach you. A persuasive writer has three basic tools for winning a reader over, and knowing the names of those tools lets you see exactly how an argument is built instead of just feeling convinced or unconvinced by it.
The first tool is ethos, the appeal to credibility. A writer earns ethos by showing the reader they have the standing to speak on this subject, through direct experience, expertise, or a track record that makes their claim worth taking seriously. Ethos does not depend on volume. It depends on whether the writer has actually put in the time or lived the experience they are writing about.
The second tool is pathos, the appeal to emotion. A writer builds pathos by giving the reader something to feel: a specific story, an image, a detail that lands harder than a statistic ever could. Pathos is not manipulation by default. Used honestly, it reminds a reader that an issue has real consequences for real people, not just abstract stakes.
The third tool is logos, the appeal to logic. A writer builds logos with evidence: statistics, documented facts, named laws or reports, anything that lets a reader check the claim against something outside the writer's own opinion. Logos is what keeps an argument from being just a feeling dressed up in confident language.
Most strong persuasive writing does not pick just one appeal. It layers them. André Bear, a Nêhîyaw (Plains Cree) lawyer and educator from Saskatchewan, does exactly this in his 2022 CBC Opinion piece "Indigenous Peoples must establish our own legal system in Canada." He builds ethos by writing as someone who had just finished law school and was stepping into the profession himself. He builds logos by citing Bill C-15 and Bill C-5, and by pointing to Norway's low recidivism rate as evidence that a different system can work. He builds pathos by naming what happened to Jody Wilson-Raybould, and by closing with a line from the late lawyer Harold Johnson: "It can't be any worse than what we have now." That closing quote does more work than another paragraph of argument would, because it lands as a feeling before it registers as a claim.
Notice that Bear does not use these appeals by accident. Every fact, every story, and every credential in the piece is doing a specific job. That is the difference between writing that happens to sound persuasive and writing built to persuade on purpose.
As you read Bear's essay, watch for the exact moment each appeal shows up. Where does he lean on ethos, where does he lean on logos, and where does he lean on pathos? Which appeal do you think does the most work in convincing you, and why?