I love giving the “what is rhetoric” lecture in my freshman writing seminar. Most students have at least heard of a rhetorical question, but most don’t know what “rhetoric” means, nor have they heard of logos, pathos and ethos.
The first thing that students need to know about rhetoric, then, is that it’s all around us in conversation, in movies, in advertisements and books, in body language, and in art. We employ rhetoric whether we’re conscious of it or not, but becoming conscious of how rhetoric works can transform speaking, reading, and writing, making us more successful and able communicators and more discerning audiences. —AP College Board
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I was being observed and my co teacher randomly asked me what is pathos, ? The whole class was looking at me and the principal as I went blank! I mean tongued tied you could hear a pin drop!
You need no help from this goof Prof. Dennis G. Jerz. You nailed it!
Freshman don’t know about rhetoric because it isn’t taught in schools nowadays. Our crash course on rhetoric came during the final stretch of senior year for one week only and was combined with a crash course on fallacies. That was in my AP class, so I can only imagine how they glossed over it in the general English courses.
I can puzzle out the last three as logos, pathos and ethos, but what is the first one, Dave? If the thing that looks like a p is pronounced like R, that could be something like “rhetoricos”.
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It’s all Greek to me: ῥητορικός, λόγος, πάθος, ἔθος.