Logos deals with appeals to the head of one's audience through the use of facts, logic and ideas. If an author is trying to appeal objective, informed, and knowledgeable, chances are, she is using logos appeals.
Pathos deals with appeals to the heart or emotions of an audience. Here, think of how the media or a politician will simplify a difficult, complex problem by using a single person or family to represent it. Appeals through pathos have become so common, they've entered popular culture through such phrases as, "He's the poster boy for...."
Ethos deals with how authors get their audience to identify with them, that is, feel a sense of trust of connection. Another way to think about ethos is how an author will work to establish credibility with an audience. In many ways, ethos is the most difficult but effective of the three kinds of appeals. Ethos is the root word for ethics, the study of how individuals in groups behave in an acceptable manner, and the notion of "ethnic group," literally a group of people who identify with one another and share an ethical system or ethos. How people identify you as part of a group includes everything from word choice to clothing to body posture; so, ethos deals with how you use the various channels of information to send the signal, I am one of you (or not).
Most of you are into gaming. I know next to nothing about digital games. Most of the games I play involve me in setting up a backgammon, go, or chess board, or they are traditional Cherokee or Navajo games. However, I have learned to look at the games I play in terms of rhetoric, and I try to figure out why they are so popular using the tools rhetoric give me.
It's a good technique for understanding games and how they work in terms of doing cultural work (more on this last concept later). The classic games, like go, chess or Monopoly, reproduce in simplified form the social structures and conventions of their culture. The upshot is folks will identify with a game, play it, and make it popular, because the game appeals to many in the culture through a kind of unconscious ethos.
For an example, think about musical chairs. Musical chairs keeps getting played, not just because it is fun, but because it reproduces much of the ethos of modern western culture. There is competition for resources. The resources are becoming more and more scarce. Those willing to compete have a better chance of securing access to the desired resources. Sometimes you are unlucky and cannot, no matter how competitive you are, secure access to the desired resources; so, most folks learn to be "good sports" about loosing. There is only one winner. In short, musical chairs is a perfect capitalist game. It reproduces in simplified form the basic "need" to compete to secure scare resources and gain status through securing them.
Monopoly is in essence the same game played through a real estate metaphor.
One way to analyze an author's message is to try to figure out how they are trying to manipulate their audience. Do they make appeals to the head (logos)? Do they try to manipulate emotions (pathos)? Do they try to gain identification with their audience through a reputation or an act which establishes some sort of kinship (ethos)? Of, most likely, is the message crafted in such a way as to combine two or more of the appeals?
Now, think about a message you've seen an author send to an audience. How did the author use the appeals in crafting their message?
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