Technique of the week · Connecting with your audience
Pathos
Make them feel it, not just know it
People act on what they feel. Give your point a face, a moment and a stake.
The idea
Pathos is persuasion through the emotions you raise in the audience. Not manipulation: it's showing why the point matters to real people. The fastest route is the specific — one person, one moment, one detail — rather than big abstract words.
How to do it
- Swap a statistic for a single person it happened to.
- Zoom in on one sensory detail: a sound, an object, a line someone said.
- Say what's at stake for the people in this room, now.
In the session
The drill
Take a dry fact ("30% of projects run late") and turn it into a 45-second story about one person. Same fact, felt.
This week
Your homework
When you explain something today, add 'for example, last week…' and tell the specific case.
When you give feedback, ask
Which moment did you feel something? Was it earned, or pushed?
Source: Aristotle, Rhetoric, Book II, ch. 2–11.