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Time for a bit of ancient wisdom.
How many of you have heard of Aristotle? How many of you have heard of Cicero? Educated,
aren't we. :-) How many of you have heard of Demosthenes? Four and a half of you, excellent.
I spent a lot of money going over some major archives to get a photograph of those three
guys and I've been assured that that's genuine, the nearest shot we could get of a marble
statue of Aristotle.
Aristotle came out with his rhetorical elements. The first one of those is logos. How many
of you ... we're talking about the words. Logos just means "the words." Part of your
communication is the words unless you're a mime artist and you can communicate a lot
from mime, can't you? Unless you're a mime artist, the words are of some real significance.
His next rhetorical element was ethos. You think about, that's where the word "ethics"
comes from, but really, we're talking about credibility here.
Do your words match what you're communicating as a person? One of the things to look out
there is you don't know much about my background, so you could go somewhere ... I think Wikipedia
tells you much about me, but you would effectively have to dig and delve to get some information
about my credibility as a speaker, as an author, whatever.
Another way in which credibility is communicated is actually from body language and we'll look
at a few examples of that later.
Another real important point when it comes to communicating is pathos. Anybody know what
pathos might refer to?
Passion?
Passion, excellent ... said with passion and clarity, thank you.
Passion. I think you can immediately ... you know the difference between a speaker who
delivers stuff with passion and those people who just kind of murmur it out and ... the
words might be fine, but with less passion. Obviously, sometimes it can get too much,
can't it, definitely. I think at other times, we just need to up that a little bit in order
to really make sure that our message has gone home to people.
Off Aristotle, on to Cicero and Demosthenes. In classical times, when Cicero had finished
speaking, the people said, "How well he speaks." "How well he speaks, he speaks so well, how
well he speaks." In contrast, when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, "Do
you have a book?" No, they didn't. They said, "Let us march!" Who got the message over with
greater impact? Demosthenes.
Yes, his words were not so precise, he was not so such a good orator, but actually, that's
him ... waving his arms, his words rang with great passion that he got his message over
and the people said, "Let us march!"