Blogging and the Art of Rhetoric

For the ancient Greeks, rhetoric was a high art. Over the centuries, its meaning has become shadowed, likened to used-car-salesmen speak and considered useful for others who will say anything to make a sale or convince an audience. In its purest form, however, bloggers use rhetoric with every post they make. At least they should. In this post, I am going to go over the three steps of rhetoric and why they are important to your success as a blogger.

Step One: Ethos

According to Aristotle, ethos is “the speaker’s power of evincing a personal character which will make his speech credible.”

Whether you are speaking to a huge audience that you must convince of your expertise or to a group of new acquaintances who trust you because you were introduced by a friend they trust, ethos gets your foot in the door. Your influence over your blog readers is rooted in ethos. They read your articles and believe in what you write because they respect you and have made some sort of connection with your writing. If you try to skip this step, it will be very hard to follow through with the next two steps.

Step Two: Pathos

For Aristotle, pathos is about a speaker’s ability to engage an audience, “his power of stirring the emotions of his hearers.” Can you feel it?

It doesn’t matter if you write about business or tropical vacations, if you cannot make your readers feel something, then you are missing your mark. By painting a picture through storytelling and description, you can bring out your reader’s emotions. Pathos at its most effective creates emphathy or sympathy through the reader’s ability to identify with the situations or characters about which you are writing.

Attempting to bring out emotions with every post you write may seem a bit overwhelming, but it isn’t as “out there” as you might first thing. Think of it this way: if you are teaching your readers about podcasting, you do not want to overwhelm or confuse them. You want to bring out emotions of excitement and the feeling that this is something that can absolutely accomplish. Whatever you may be writing for or about, you will always seek to bring about pathos in your readers.

Step Three: Logos

Aristotle describes logos as the “power of proving a truth, or an apparent truth, by means of persuasive arguments.”

It is only after you have created trust (ethos) and interest (pathos) that you can get down to the real content and meaning of an article. The logic or logos is the real meat and potatoes of a post so it might be surprising that it is last on the list. However, if you cannot capture the eyes/ears and heart of your audience, the content is a mute point.

The logos of your article is where the teaching, information or - as Aristotle puts it - persuading take place. Once you have sold yourself to your readers, it is then time to sell your ideas.

Rhetorical writing may seem like a bit much for blog posts, but I assure you that it isn’t. The explanations above clearly just brush the surface of the ideas behind rhetoric. Being that it is a very old and complicated art, there are many different aspects that could not be covered in several books, let alone one blog article. However, this introduction should suffice for those of you wanting to follow the old rhetorical traditions when you write for your blogs. I think you’ll find them to be a successful way to gain and retain readers.

For a more in depth discussion of the ideas covered in this article, you can read the entire text of Aristotle’s Rhetoric online. I am not at all affiliate with that site, just sharing a resource.