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Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, or the Musketeers of Words




The art of public speaking and respectful debate is one that we seem to need badly these day and age, when the language of bias, hate and contempt is overflowing the public domains online. 

To fight fake news, logical fallacies, manipulation and promote a culture of respectful exchange of valid, structured and well- developed ideas we need to teach critical thinking, argument building and rebuttal, and that exactly what Oxford debates stand for. 

I have been using Oxford style debates to give my class discussions a nice formal framework and  to tame controversial topics, such as Compulsory religious education, and they worked really well, especially with my IB students.

Not an easy task, right? 

The three musketeers come to the rescue:)


To be a successful speaker you need to resort to all three appeals, developed by Aristotle himself and described in his classic On Rhetoric, designed to have the audience to believe your argument. 

Ethos appeals to the audience making them trust the person making the argument (credibility, trustworthiness, reputation)

Pathos appeals to the audience emotions, asking them to believe because they care (emotion). 

Logos appeals to the audience sense of logic and rationality asking them to believe because the argument makes sense (reasoning, facts and figures). 

Those appeals can be a tool of persuasion, but also a shield against manipulation, as knowing them you can also tell when they are being played. 

Embrace them all and make your students fight their battles with potent arguments within the framework of Oxford style debate.

Here is my starting kit: 
(All the materials were created to help students and teachers prepare for the tournament of Musketeers of the Word, a great debating event organized in Bydgoszcz, Poland- you can check it out here http://musketeersofwords.eu/)

Feel free to use the materials, hope you’ll find them useful:) 

If you’d like to ask me anything, you can do so in the comments below or via my Facebook page. 

Happy debating! (and always stick to the ten commandments below)





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