EARTHSS 60B Lecture Notes - Depth Sounding, Pathos, Sea Level Rise
27 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Lecture 1
Rhetoric- art of persuasion (changing people’s attitude and behaviors)
● Tools for rhetoric
○Logos- logic, reasoning
■ Based off of facts, statistics, graphs, etc.
■ Ex. the greenhouse effect (scientific explanation)
○Ethos- ethics, character, experience
■ Based on a person’s credibility based on their trustworthiness, honesty,
and ethics
■ Ethos in scientific writing- invoke experts to give credibility to your work
○Pathos- passion, emotion, feelings
■ Appeal to a person’s feelings
■ Relies on coherent delivery
■ Appeal to a person’s values
○Kairos- timeliness, urgency
■ Being at the right place at the right time
● Why rhetorical technique
○ Change minds of others and motivate them to act
○ Understand what persuades you most in an argument. What is your opinion
based on?
○ Construct stronger rebuttals
○ Identify false arguments
Essay #1 an inconvenient truth
Identify examples of rhetoric
Al Gore
Ethos -
● mark twain quote during speech
● Continuously mentions how he ran for president to shine some light on the climate issue,
talks about his involvement with the white house
● Shows videos of him running for office, making speeches, signing documents, at the
white house when bush got elected
● Videos of him growing up on a farm and working on it from the time he was a kid
○ Explains how over time the land has changed very quickly
Logos
● Story about scientist (one with the weather balloons in the pacific) shows old videos of
him conducting research and the data tables and charts they found
○ Shows that chart in his talk
