The first messaging strategy based on classical rhetoric involves building believability. Aristotle call this ethos or apply the ethical appeal. And in many respects, this is probably the most important messaging strategy that we could ever adopt. Because of our readers or listeners don't believe us, they don't believe that we are credible. We'll never be able to persuade them, we'll never be able to move them to action or get them to do what we'd like them to do. The ethical appeal is something we see very frequently in political communications, where the candidate is looking to establish his or her moral standing and virtue and always trying to discredit or downplay the credibility of their opponent.
But how do we go about building believability but Aristotle tell us about what we need to do to build believability. He told us to focus on three key things. We build believability by illustrating wisdom. In other words by demonstrating to our listeners or our readers, that we have the intelligence and experience and a firm grasp of the issues at hand. Next, we could show moral character, where we demonstrate our inherent goodness. In other words, we illustrate character by demonstrating virtue.
Things like courage, generosity, caution, practicality. Lastly, we show goodwill require that we demonstrate an interest in people's welfare. This can include showing how you've made sacrifices to your own happiness or comfort, to benefit others an example donations you may have given to help The needy. Later I'll talk about outlining and arranging and how to structure our content for maximum impact. But when we're talking about the ethical appeal or building believability, this is something we have to do right at the very outset of whatever it is we're writing the introduction. As we move forward in terms of our communications, we always have to establish our credibility and continually reinforce it.
Effective persuasive communications require establishing believability of the message source, whether that sources yourself person on whose behalf you're working or product you're promoting. We build believability by citing examples of intelligence, compassion, generosity, and we must remember to continually reinforce credibility throughout all phases of the speech we're giving or the content that we're developing. In the next lesson, I'll talk about another critical messaging strategy based on classical rhetoric. And that involves leveraging logic