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The Art of Persuasion

The Art of Persuasion

Last updated on: August 20, 2025 at 6:00 am by Vance Morgan

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The Art of Persuasion 2025-08-19T16:53:37-04:00 Vance Morgan

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I was asked a few days ago to participate in an ongoing project on campus related to our required core interdiciplinary, team-taught progem, a project that seeks to create various videos that emphasize the numerous skills and techniques that should be developed during a student’s four-semester experience in this program. My assigned topic is “Persuasion.” Here is my first draft.

What does it take to be persuasive? Passion? Facts? Logic? Authority? Status? We live in a polarized world in which people tend to either ignore or get angry at those who disagree with them. We have lost the ability to change our minds and the willingness to believe that we might be wrong, preferring instead to surround ourselves with those who already believe as we do. Algorithms on social media entrench this polarization even more deeply, feeding us what we want to hear and encouraging us to be angry at those who disagree. Have you recently witnessed anyone online change their mind about anything important? I didn’t think so.

Back in prehistoric times when I was in high school, I was a member of the debate team. One of our team members, Dave, was a master of persuasion. He could make a persuasive argument on any topic from any side—a great strength in debate competitions, since we would know the topic of the debate ahead of time but would not know which side our team would be arguing for until the day of the competition. Dave’s ability to effectively argue any side of any issue made him the go-to member of our team. What made Dave so skilled at persuading others?

In the ancient world, the art of convincing speech was at a premium and professional communicators called “Sophists” were available for hire. For a price, the Sophists could teach you how to be Dave, how to be a persuasive public speaker on any topic whatsoever, learning how, as one Sophist put it, how “to make the weaker argument the stronger.” Aristotle lived in the world of the Sophists—and he was not impressed. He believed that the purpose of discussion and debate should be to seek the truth, not to win the argument. The Sophists were turning the pursuit of truth and goodness into a game with winners and losers. Aristotle thought we could and must do better.

So how does one become persuasive while also seeking truth? What are the elements of being a persuasive communicator? According to Aristotle, the elements of persuasive communication are like a three-legged stool: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.

Ethos: Ethos is about credibility. If I am to be persuasive, it’s important to establish why I am an appropriate and trustworthy person to be speaking on the topic at hand. Is it because of my credentials? My experience? Although we are used to people saying that “I have the right to my opinion,” I often tell my students that a liberally educated person earns the right to have an opinion. Otherwise, opinions are like body parts. Everyone has them.

Beyond the issue of credibility, being persuasive also demands that I be trustworthy rather than simply convincing. The Sophists, for instance, were master convincers but everyone knew that they had no “skin in the game” other than building their fame and bank account. They had no commitment to the truth, only a commitment to winning arguments. Credibility is established not only by one’s credentials and experience, but also by one’s character. The persuasive person speaks with an authority that is earned, not simply described by title, age, or job description. Persuasive authority is earned over time—we tend to criticize and stop paying attention to a person whose opinions change depending on the last person they talked to. To be persuasive, one’s audience must be convinced that you are not trying to be manipulative and that you don’t have an exclusively selfish agenda.

Logos: The Greek word logos can mean many things; for the purposes of Aristotle’s discussion, it refers both to the factual evidence supporting and the logical structure of one’s argument. Aristotle tended to emphasize this leg of the stool more than the other two, arguing that the persuasiveness of one’s communication is built on a foundation of verifiable facts or information that are more than one’s subjective opinion; rather such facts can be objectively verified and agreed to. These are the sorts of facts that, as my father used to say, “are true whether you like it or not.”

The logos aspect of persuasive communication, however, requires far more than just a verifiably factual starting point. Such facts must be arranged into a valid argument, where premises lead logically to a conclusion that is guaranteed to be true if all of the premises are true and the structure of the argument is logically sound. This is the realm of reason and rationality. If human beings are, as Aristotle defined elsewhere, the “rational animal,” then ensuring that our communication is rooted in reason, logic, and facts is part of being truly human in the best sense.

Pathos: The contemporary moral philosopher Alasdair MacInyre writes that “human beings are story-telling animals.” This brings us to the third leg of Aristotle’s three-legged persuasion stool: pathos, which is about connecting with the person or audience whom you are seeking to persuade on an emotional level. Facts, data, and logic are all well and good, but on their own they are unlikely to be convincing to creatures who love to tell and hear stories. In her novel Gourmet Rhapsody, Muriel Barbery writes that “Life exists only by virtue of the osmosis between words and facts, where the former encase the latter in ceremonial dress.” In order to be persuasive, one must choose the right word clothing in which to dress one’s facts and logic.

After three and a half decades of being a college professor, I have come to realize that, more than anything else, I am a storyteller in the classroom. Facts, the one damn thing after another that provide the stuff of reality, are naked and uninteresting until shaped by a context, energized by a story, or illuminated by narrative light. Accordingly, despite Aristotle’s emphasis on logos, I believe that pathos is the most important leg on the stool of persuasion, in that it addresses the questions Why do I care about this? Why should anyone else care about this? The answers to these questions are usually not found in the facts; rather, these answers emerge through stories. Persuasive communicators draw the people they are talking to into the topic through narratives, stories, and personal examples.

Ethos, Logos, and Pathos working together bring the whole person into the act of persuasion. We are not simply logical brains, nor are we just emotional animals. Aristotle would have us believe that since we are creatures of both head and heart, both reason and emotion, persuasive communication must speak to both in a way that, in the best of circumstances, will lead everyone involved toward what is both good and true.

Will Aristotle’s insights work in our polarized 21st century? That depends on whether we are willing to engage with and learn from each other while leaving polarization, defensiveness, and suspicion behind. Alternative facts must give way to shared facts. Effective communication and persuasion require us to remember our shared humanity and require that we recognize that some facts are true whether we like them or not, remembering that no one of us knows everything. Always be willing to temper “this is what I believe” with “but I might be wrong” or “but I still have a lot to learn.”

Persuasive communication is risky. Are you willing to put yourself and your most cherished beliefs on the line, not only seeking to persuade others but also being open to being persuaded yourself? Conversation, discussion, and persuasion are not games with winners and losers. They are activities which, when taken seriously and engaged in wisely, are most central to being human.

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