Utilizing effective language within a speech in order to appeal to the emotions of the audience.
Objective: Following the lesson, students will be able demonstrate their knowledge of pathos by incorporating effective language and imagery into their speeches that will appeal to an audience’s emotions.
Materials: Cookies, Advertisements, Excerpts from Speeches
Steps:
1. Teacher explains pathos and its purpose of appealing to an audience’s emotions and of serving as the category by which we can understand the psychological aspect of rhetoric.
2. Teacher shows students a variety of visual rhetoric in the form of advertisements and asks them to “think-pair-share” to react and respond.
3. Teacher then shows students excerpts from a variety of speeches and asks them to “think-pair-share” to react and respond.
4. Finally, teacher shares homemade cookies with the class and has them all utilize pathos (language that evokes emotions) to create a short speech about those cookies. Students should be encouraged to incorporate poignant memories, stirring stories and compelling images to elicit emotional response from their audience.
Result: Students will have a better understanding of the definition of pathos and how pathos can be effectively incorporated into a speech.
Possible Advertisements:
“Kill a Cigarette and Save a Life. Yours”
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
“You think being in school sucks? You know what sucks a whole lot more? A baby – almost every 2 hours for feeding time. And breast feeding isn’t always easy, so I’ll choose to use formula, you’re looking at about $1500 a year. Guess school doesn’t suck that badly, huh?”
Possible Speech Excerpts:
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
-Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream”
The great challenge of this conference is to give voice to women everywhere whose experiences go unnoticed, whose words go unheard. Women comprise more than half the word’s population, 70% of the world’s poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read and write. We are the primary caretakers for most of the world’s children and elderly. Yet much of the work we do is not valued — not by economists, not by historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders.
At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated. They are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation. They are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers. They are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending offices and banned from the ballot box.
-Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”
Elizabeth Thomas
Fall 2009
Let Your Audience Feel IT!
Objective: After the activity, students will be able to understand and incorporate pathos appeal to their speeches.
Materials:Mini-Poster Board for every student in your class, markers, magazines, and glue.
Steps:
1. Have students write in their Journal about the Journal Topic, “What is pathos? And provide one example.”
This might be the first day of the lesson plan on pathos, ethos, and logos – but if it is not then the students will probably have a more direct and correct answer. This activity will take 10 -15 minutes.
2. Then the teacher will write the proper definition of pathos on the board, or overhead for the whole class to see. Request the class to write this definition down right underneath the definition they provided within their Journal.
A. an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion
B. an emotion of sympathetic pity
Etymology: Greek – suffering, experience, and emotion from paschein (aorist pathein) meaning to experience, suffer; perhaps akin to Lithuanian kesti to suffer
3. After definition is clear to all, ask the students to double check if the example they provided in their Journal entry still holds up. Then one by one have students come up and read their example with passion, and we are a class will evaluate if it evoked our emotions or not.
This activity might take the remainder of the class time, depending on class size.
If it does leave at least 10 minutes at the end of the period to explain the assignment to the students.
4. When activity is complete or you have 10 minutes left in the class period explain to students that many Advertisements do so well because they evoke pathos to sell their products. Students are going to design an advertisement with the mini-poster boards you hand out in class. They can use a product already in existence or they can make one up. Must be colorful, and more importantly evoke the audience’s emotion. Give the students reminder of the time to rip pages out of magazine and start a basic design for their advertisement – the rest must be done at home as Homework.
Objective:
Same
Materials:
Schedule for students to present their Advertisements.
Steps:
1. Tell the students that you have already randomly created a schedule for them to speak about their Advertisements. (If you have a large class the speakers may take two days)
The time limit for the speech is 5 minutes.
As a class after each speaker we will discuss how their advertisement worked in evoking sympathy or pity from the class.
2. Get Started! Start calling students names and having them say
A. What product they are advertising
B. What their poster says
C. What elements were used to evoke audience appeal with pathos?
Results:
Students will have first hand experience using pathos to evoke audience sympathy and emotion. They should be able to transfer these elements to their speeches and papers.
Students will use pathos effectively in their persuasive speeches
Material: A teacher– various topics of persuasive speeches
Steps:
1. Divide students into five or six groups
2. Assign a topic to each group
3. Each group discusses which emotion is effective in their persuasive speech
4. Groups create a short outline using the emotion they chose for the topics
5. The representative of each group presents their outline of a speech
6. After one group presents their outline, other groups’ students comment on the effective points of the outline related to emotions and advise how to improve the speech using pathos
7. Keep going until each group presents their outline
8. Each group discusses if there are any emotions they can use for the topic beside the emotion they picked up
9. If groups find different emotions to make the speech effectively, share their ideas with other students
Result: Students will create a speech using pathos effectively and identify which emotional appeal is proper to which topic
Yuriko Onishi
Fall 2007