Lesson video

Welcome to today's English lesson I'm Missus Crompton.

Our focus today is to look at planning techniques for our viewpoint writing.

You will need a pen and paper, take a moment to make sure you have cleared any distractions away and have everything you need to hand.

To begin with then, let's have a quick recap on the writing process that we are working with.

We have five stages to our writing process, think, plan, draught, critique, and then write.

We are working today on the planning stage we've done a little bit of thinking about the content and we've thought about the purpose and audience, so today we move on to planning.

In terms of success criteria, are three success criteria areas where organisation, vocabulary selection and technical control.

We're going to concentrate particularly on the first column and we're going to be thinking about how we are going to choose the content and also think about how we're going to link and develop our ideas and structure those ideas to create a deliberate effect on our reader.

Now in order to do that, we're going to borrow from the Greek tradition of rhetoric and in particular, we're going to look at these three areas, logos, pathos, and ethos.

I'll explain those in a moment, but just a quick reminder of the question we are working with, all sports should be fun, fair and open to everyone it's the taking part, not the winning that matters.

Write an article for a magazine in which you present your viewpoint.

So today, as I said we're going to look to the Greeks and we're going to borrow some of that understanding of rhetorical features that work together to create persuasive writing or orations 'cause they also thought about this in relation to speeches.

The four areas, we're going to look at are logos, pathos, ethos and I say four, I've added a fourth element kairos that I will come to.

So let's look at these one by one.

Now, don't worry about trying to write everything down immediately, I will indicate a pause point after we've looked each section and then you can pause and resume as you're ready and make sure that you've got all the notes down, okay? So logos is Greek for word and underneath we an explanation, it focuses the attention on the message and it's based on logic, reason and facts.

So actually let's think about that, if you are going to write a piece of viewpoint writing or if you were giving a speech while you're expressing your viewpoint, giving the logical reasons, putting in the factual information is absolutely crucial, isn't it? So one thing that we must have in our viewpoint piece is a clear explanation of why we think what we think.

So that's number one, logos, those factual pieces of information and those are basically your key points.

Moving on to pathos, pathos is Greek for suffering, it focuses attention on the values and beliefs of the intended audience and it appeals to our feelings and imagination.

So pathos is a reference to the elements of our writing, where we try and create emotional responses.

It's the anecdote, or it's the emotive language that we inject into our writing and what we're trying to do is to appeal to the readers, pathos.

Moving to ethos, that is Greek for character and it focuses attention on the writers trustworthiness.

So here you have to believe in the character of the person who is writing the piece or who is giving the speech in order to feel a connection, this is what the Greeks understood by it.

Now I want to just extend that a little bit, so this is my little twist on the Greeks and I hope the Greeks don't mind, but I want us to think about ethos and also to take from that root, this idea of a moral stance.

when we're judging the trustworthiness of the reader sorry the writer, let me get that in the right way around.

When we are judging the trustworthiness of the writer, we as readers are adopting a moral stance.

We believe in something and the writer is echoing those beliefs therefore, a feeling of trust is built up.

So we're going to add this dimension of a moral stance within that and that's, what's working when the ethos is being tested.

This is also the place where I think that the wider contexts come in, this is where our character as a society is also questioned, where testing the trustworthiness of certain beliefs and values.

So big picture ideas come under the category of ethos, I'm going to link that to trustworthiness and moral stance.

Okay final word, kairos.

I think this is really interesting and it's important when we think about the term that we adopt in our writing and also some of our content choices, kairos is Greek for right time.

So when we are writing, we need to select the right tone and we need to select the right register.

If you're writing to an MP, you're going to write using a particularly formal register in comparison to delivering a speech to your peers in assembly, so we've got different tones.

The other thing that comes under this category is picking the right example in order to really promote your line of argument.

So for example, if we were looking at celebrity, I might put down in my piece of writing Kylie Minogue, blah, blah, blah, Kylie Minogue.

'Cause I know Kylie Minogue of as a big celebrity and you might be who's she? Oh she's that older lady because you're much younger than me, so you might not make that reference.

If I switched the Kylies and I put in Kylie Jenner, bingo! You've got to immediately, you've got the idea of celebrity that is thinking about the right choice for the right time.

Okay, pause here if you need to, to get down any additional notes and then we will move on.

And welcome back, so for our planning, what we're going to do is to plan using the following grids.

So on your piece of paper, in a moment, I'm going to ask you to think about developing your initial ideas to our question.

And thinking about them under the categories of whether they meet the needs of logos, pathos, or ethos, okay? To explain a little bit further and just to absolutely consolidate, let's just have a look at an example from the sample model that we looked at in our previous session, I've just taken the opening of the piece and I have tried to show you underneath where logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos appear.

So we have the section, everyone likes to win, whether it's through dumb luck or years of training, nobody turns their nose up at first place, modest or not.

The feeling of being better than someone else although selfish keeps the drive to continue strong, who doesn't want to win? And underneath, you can see that I colour coded, logos and pathos are combined within this opening, the person who's written it, has thought very much about getting some sort of emotional response immediately.

Secondly, ethos, it's implied by the idea of who we place our value, where we place our value as a society.

And within this, why we're actually questioning the trustworthiness of the writer? Because the writer is giving the counter argument and what we're thinking is, does winning always matter.

So we're actually questioning and remember counter-argument was presented first.

Kairos that's the term, the terms correct, isn't it? It was a magazine piece so it's engaging and also entertaining.

That is a further function of a magazine article, it's not just there to give us information.

So logos and pathos are combined within the content, ethos is there because we're thinking, hang on a minute, I don't know if I agree with this, but we remember it was the counter-argument and then finally kairos is within the overall term that has been adopted.

Right, what I'm going to do, is to take you back to the beginning and now give you control.

And what I would like you to do is to concentrate on the question, all sports should be fun, fair and open to everyone, it's the taking part, not the winning that matters.

And I would like you to organise your thoughts under the categories of logos, pathos and ethos.

When you have completed your initial planing, just with the ideas, you don't have to be writing up an answer, it is literally just bullet pointing your ideas under those areas then please resume the video and I'll be waiting with the next step, over to you.

And welcome back, so now what we're going to do is to think about the actual sequencing of the information we've got.

So we've got the three boxes logos, pathos, ethos we're now going to think about the order that they're going to appear on, when we get to an actual plan and here is my suggestion.

So we've got introduction, setting up our argument and we've just been reading the model answers introduction.

I've then suggested a good location for logos would be a start of our essay, so that we are establishing our viewpoint and the reasons early on, if you notice at points two to three and it could be interchangeable, I've suggested thinking about pathos there, would be appropriate because that's where you want to maybe create a sort of climax to your argument.

You want to really build towards central emotional response.

And then I've suggested that our ethos points might be best placed towards the end where we're trying to then finally review and test the moral stance and trustworthiness of the whole argument.

So what we've done so far, we've thought about our ideas.

What we need to make sure is that we have now got that as a refined sentence that you can summarise and that's going to give your response in a single statement and that's going to go in the introduction, we're then going to go to logos, pathos, and ethos, to work through the main body.

I want you to check your planning and think about whether you have included the four conflicts or you've got any of those bigger picture statements that really extend your reader's moral stance.

And then finally, I want you to check that you have considered kairos, have you thought about who you are as a speaker and who you're talking to and what is you want to achieve from this piece of writing? To help you, I'm also going to give you the model response again.

Okay, so it's all there.

So what your aim now is to switch from the three columns into the following five step sequenced plans, so that we've almost got flow charts of how our viewpoint essay is going to work.

You will be able to do that by working through all of the planning notes here to help you and reviewing the model answer.

So it's going to be over to you now, to work through the slides, to make your notes and to produce your plan.

There we go, that's at the beginning, over to you to take control and I will be waiting for you at the other side.

And welcome back, so you should have all of your ideas now sequenced and what we've also achieved today is adapt to our line of argument because we have considered logos, pathos and ethos.

Thank you for your focus today, please remember to keep this work and bring it to our next learning session.

Can I also remind you, don't forget to complete the end quiz and other than that, may I wish you an enjoyable experience with the rest of your learning today.