Teaching Freshmen to Reason—And Live—Through Aristotle's Modes of Persuasion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the three Aristotelian modes of persuasion, pathos, ethos, and logos, are generally treated discretely in composition textbooks based on traditional rhetoric, in practice they are interdependent. This paper shows how interdependence among the modes becomes the basis for the second term of a first-year composition course. Students examine the modes of persuasion in texts related to the theme of Tyranny and Freedom from one of the volumes of the Lynchburg College Symposium Readings (LCSR) program, of which the course is a part. Overlaps among the modes of persuasion are explored in writing about the theme as applied to the self, family, friends, and national and international communities, to help students become aware of the powers of persuasion in their lives. Illustrations of first-year student work include a website by Jon Hart, who also created a video showing fallacies of reasoning in Hitler's speeches during the Holocaust, followed by graphic evidence from the concentration camps, and web portfolios of essays prepared by April Davis and Stephanie Eagle, linking modes of persuasion to the central course theme. I. Modes of Persuasion Defined In testing various parts of classical theory in teaching writing while a visiting preceptor at Harvard University in 1993 and at Lynchburg College since 1989, I have found that the classical rhetoric provides a structured framework for students, without locking them into an excessively vague (for example, limited to free-flow, expressive approach to writing) or rigid system (for example, limited to the five-paragraph essay). While some students will find reading the primary source difficult, Aristotle's Rhetoric is especially useful for teachers, as it provides theory from which assignments can be developed to explore the interplay between speaker/writer and audience, or between the self and the rest of the world, a consciousness that first-year students do not always bring to their classes. Aristotle defines the artistic or learned methods of persuasion thus, addressing a debate that still goes on among composition students: do we need this theory or can we just compose innately? Of the pisteis, some are atechnic [nonartistic], some entechnic [embodied in art, artistic]. I call atechnic those that are not provided by us [the potential speaker] but are preexisting: for example, witnesses, testimony of slaves taken under torture, contracts, and such like; and artistic whatever can be prepared by method and by us; thus, one must use the former and invent the latter. Of the pisteis provided through speech there are three species: for some are in the character [ethos] of the speaker, and some in disposing the listener in some way, and some in the argument [logos] itself, by showing or seeming to show something. [Rhet. 1.2.2] Following are Aristotle's definitions of the specific modes of persuasion: Teaching Freshmen To Reason—And Live—Through Aristotle's Modes Of Persuasion 2
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".