In a post on The Script Lab blog, Shanee Edwards examines the concepts of ethos, pathos, and logos and how you can use them in your story. “These concepts can serve as writing tools that can help you communicate your story to the audience in a way that encourages them to suspend their disbelief and fully engage in your film,” she says.
Known as the rhetorical triangle, these concepts are methods of audience persuasion:
- Ethos: The “Appeal to Authority” that attempts to persuade an audience that what’s being communicated is coming from someone qualified or credible.
- Pathos: The “Appeal to Emotion” that attempts to persuade an audience using their emotional response to things like hooks, metaphors, anecdotes, or even impassioned speeches or dialogue.
- Logos: The “Appeal to Logic” that attempts to persuade an audience using reason, facts, and rationality
While these sound like methods used in public debate or essays, they also can be used in fiction, as you want to persuade your audience to keep watching or reading. “A good writer ideally crafts a character that’s sympathetic, relatable, or even despicable — but one the audience can get emotionally invested in,” Edwards says. “The triangle of rhetoric offers three specific ways to do this so let’s look at each one.”
- Pathos: Appeal to Emotion. By crafting scenes that appealing to various of your audience’s emotions, you can make your character more sympathetic or relatable. Your hero might perform a good deed, be bullied or humiliated, or suffer some injustice. All of these appeal to different emotions in your audience. Done well, these scenes will encourage your readers to root for your protagonist.
- Logos: Appeal to Logic. Even when writing the wildest fantasy or science fiction, your story has to make internal sense and the events should feel like something that could actually happen in the story world.
- Ethos: Appeal to Authority. In fiction, the appeal to authority is an appeal to your audience’s morals and ethics. “This can be very apparent in courtroom dramas where the ‘little guy’ goes up against a corporation with loads of cash or the government with endless resources,” Edwards writes.
Edwards examines the movie Jaws to see how ethos, pathos, and logos are used to pull the audience into the story.
