Aristotle's ethos / pathos / logos — the oldest and still load-bearing decomposition of persuasion, part of persuasion-theory.
- Ethos — the speaker's credibility/character: why the reader should trust you.
- Pathos — the audience's emotion: why they should care.
- Logos — logic/evidence: why the claim is true.
- Kairos — the opportune moment; timeliness. Tie the message to a live moment and the same words land harder.
DO THIS — never ship logos-only. Pure argument gives the reader no reason to trust you (ethos) or to care (pathos), so it slides off even when correct. Establish standing early, attach the claim to something the reader feels, then prove it. The balance shifts by involvement (the-two-routes): logos carries the central route; ethos + pathos carry the peripheral.
The five canons — Aristotle's production pipeline, which doubles as a drafting checklist:
- Invention — find the arguments/material.
- Arrangement — order them (see primacy/recency in peripheral-cues).
- Style — the wording (the clarity-and-frameworks + voice-as-instrument layer).
- Memory — for oratory; for content this becomes stickiness/formatting (narrative-and-concreteness).
- Delivery — for oratory; for content this becomes channel fit + prosody direction (what-transfers-to-agent-content).
For the machine: the canons map cleanly onto a generator's stages (find → order → phrase → make memorable → format for the channel), and "balance the three appeals" is a checkable property of a draft — a logos-only draft is a named defect.
Parent: persuasion-theory.