Lesson video

I'm Mrs. Crompton.

Welcome to today's English lesson.

Our focus today is to look at how to plan for a viewpoint piece, and in particular, we're going to be looking at logos, pathos, and ethos.

You will need a pen and paper.

I'd also like you to have your notes from lesson one with you too.

Take a moment to make sure you've cleared any distractions away and have everything you need to hand.

Okay, so before we start to work on our particular piece of writing, I want to take us back to what we call the writing process.

And a reminder that with any piece of writing, there are five stages that we work through.

We need to do our thinking.

We need to think about what the question is asking.

We need to think about the content that we're going to include.

We need to think about how we want to present a relationship between ourselves and the reader.

We need to then do some planning.

We need to get our ideas together.

We need to sequence things.

We need to organise our thoughts.

Drafting is crucial.

Making sure that we have thought about the precision of our phrasing, thinking again about positioning of material.

Making sure that we're looking through what we are writing and being critical of ourselves, so that's the next step, critique.

Drafting, critiquing work hand in hand.

Now an interesting thing to consider if you're writing under timed conditions, but you are still doing it, you make little editing choices as you go along, and you need to remind yourselves to do that.

The actual writing is a final outcome of all of this consideration, so write comes at the end, and that's when you then go back and produce the piece as a response to the whole of the five steps.

Okay.

Now as well as thinking about the writing process, we are also going to be thinking about individual components within our writing.

We need to consider our organisation, in particular, engaging with our reader and being convincing with our ideas, and making sure that we are structuring in a very deliberate way to create a certain impact.

Within our vocabulary, we need to be precise, and we have different linguistic devices that we can use within viewpoint writing.

Pronouns, listing, anaphora, some of the new things that we've been considering as we've been reading nonfiction material.

Finally, we need to make sure that we take care of our technical control.

Checking through is part of the editing process, and also within the planning process for particular sentences.

Thinking about what the impact and what the effect of particular pieces of punctuation are within a sentence and on the meaning of the piece.

What I would like you to do now is to take a piece of paper, and we're going to have a look at thinking tools and some ideas that will hopefully help you at that initial planning and thinking stage.

One of the biggest problems that people have with viewpoint writing is that they run out of ideas or their ideas are all very thin.

They can get lots of bits of ideas, but maybe not something that forms a comprehensive line of argument.

So what we're going to do is we're going to borrow from the Greeks for a few ideas.

If you take your note paper, what we will do is to make sure that you have recorded the four key words, logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos, and then also how this is applicable to our viewpoint writing.

So that's your focus in your note taking.

So logos in Greek means "word", and it focuses attention on the message based on logic, reason, and facts.

One of the main things that a viewpoint piece needs to do is to tell you why you think that.

So that logic is absolutely crucial.

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

So if we create pathos within our writing, we are recreating an emotional response and reaction in our reader, emotive language, using very precise vocabulary that's quite passionate in nature to get that emotional response.

Ethos is Greek for "character".

It focuses attention on the writer's trustworthiness.

Now this is an interesting idea, this idea of ethos, and what I want to add to it is this idea that it brings in the ethics, this sort of character of the person who's both writing, but also our character as readers.

When it comes to ethos, you are appealing to those bigger picture ideas, and you're asking questions about what type of society we actually are, and what's important to us.

So it's extending the argument to take in those bigger picture ideas.

And the final word I have for you here is kairos, which is Greek for "right time".

And this refers to the timeliness of an argument or its content.

So for example, I showed you a picture of Kylie Jenner because she is current, you know who she is, it's relevant to my audience, and I'm thinking about something that you would recognise.

If I'd put a picture of Kylie Minogue up, you might recognise her, but not as timely, not as appropriate.

Under kairos, we also have a consideration of your tone, how you are speaking within your piece to your audience.

So if you've got a task that asks you to speak to an NP, you're not going to speak in the same way as a task where you're speaking to a peer, or you're asked to write a speech for an assembly at school.

We've got to think about kairos, how appropriate the choice is that we are making for the task and purpose of what we're doing, how appropriate are the content choices that we are making.

Okay, ladies and gentlemen, opportunity for you to get those notes down, and then what we're going to do is to move on to trying those out.

And first of all what I want you to do is to sum up in one sentence, your response.

So we're going to actually get your viewpoint nice and clear.

"People who save lives or help improve the lives of others are the true role models of today." On your piece of paper, can you write down in one refined sentence, what your answer is to that question? And that is the central argument that you wish to form.

Okay.

The next step is to go back over the material, and then also add to that material if there are any gaps.

And we're going to separate our ideas out and decide whether they appeal to logos, pathos, or ethos, to make sure that we have covered all three of those categories, okay? So you're going to look back over your material.

If there are any gaps, you can address them.

And just to be absolutely sure of what this looks like, let's apply logos, pathos, ethos to the model answer that we read in lesson one.

"Our TVs are littered with celebrities and emaciated models who live their lives being famous for simply being famous.

The celebs receive billions of pounds for tanning and wearing the latest swimwear while courageous men and women receive a modest wage for choking on smoke to carry us from a burning building, racing through the streets to shock a heart of someone's mother, father, brother back into action.

Firemen and women, doctors, nurses, lifeguards, scientists, and emergency rescue services toil day and night to keep the human race, well, running." Now, I wanted to give you just a paragraph, and from that paragraph, to demonstrate to you that we have the following features.

So the logical detail within this paragraph is the rationale, the reasoning, of the fact that celebs get millions of pounds, billions of pounds, and firefighters are paid a pittance in comparison, so that is the rationale.

That is the point that is being made.

Within that, we start with logos at the beginning, the logic, and then we have a sentence that actually develops into pathos, where it goes from emotional response by juxtaposing those two very different types of money that the two individuals in society are getting.

Okay, so we've actually got logos and pathos in one section.

In terms of ethos, I thought that was implied by the first few words, "our TVs are littered".

There's an idea here that we place value on this really quite fake celebrity.

The word "littered" implies an attitude there.

So I thought there was a comment there about the values of society.

Perhaps, something within the model answer that could have been made more of, so it could be something that you want to address in your own answer.

And finally, I felt that the final line shows kairos.

There is evidence here that the writer is aware of building a relationship with me as a reader, and it's consistent with the criteria or a magazine piece.

So you've got that informality of the final line.

Okay, so that's an example of how logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos do exist within these pieces of writing.

Those are the technical terms to describe what's going on, but they also allow you to start thinking about whether your answer has got sufficient depth.

It's over to you.

You are going to now create a table where you're checking off and then adding in any gaps where you haven't hit logos, pathos, and ethos with the ideas that you've already generated.

Back to the first part, and it's over to you.

And welcome back.

So for this next stage, what we're going to do is to turn all of our notes into a sequence.

So we're now dealing with the organisation and creating a clear plan for our writing.

I want to share with you the following planning frame.

And over the next few lessons, we're actually going to slow write different components within the frame.

Today however, your task is to put your ideas into a sequence.

Where I've got point one, you're actually going to have the idea.

So it might be, if we use the example we've just looked at, that point one is, "look at the discrepancy in pay for these two groups of people".

And that could be an idea that you want to explore, "it is ridiculous that people get that sort of money".

So that's one of your points.

You've got your logos in there, and I'm going to put that as point one.

And through all of your ideas, you're going to decide on the sequence and how you're going to travel from one idea into the next.

I've put down some suggestions of where you might naturally find logos.

So that whole idea of setting up logical reasons often naturally comes at the beginning of an essay.

We've then got pathos in the middle.

If you've got a particularly dramatic emotional example, a key point that you want to have, it kind of makes sense that it's going to come in the middle of the essay to grab your reader's attention.

Okay, so I've put pathos in the middle.

And then finally, I've built down, so that when I get to my conclusion, that's where I make sure that my scope extends, and I'm thinking about making some sort of social comment about the values in society, and that's where ethos comes in.

So by the end of this section, what I would like you to have is a clear five point sequence of ideas, where you have identified and checked that you have covered logos, pathos, and ethos.

Quick recap on what we've done so far.

We've got our ideas.

We've written our refined sentence, so if you have that at the top, that will help you keep on track.

We've thought about the sequencing, logos, ethos, pathos.

I've got all of this here as a reminder for you.

You can then check, bring in four conflicts.

That can still be there in your conclusion.

That sort of idea of man versus man, man versus nature, man versus society, helps you generate that ethos point.

And then finally, as you are planning, keep checking your kairos.

Remind yourself, who am I, who am I speaking to, and what is it that I'm trying to achieve within my piece of writing.

So it's just a little bit of a checklist there to help you as you are planning.

And then finally, I've included the model response too, just in case you get a little bit stuck, and you just want to check something out, and you can have a look at how this one was sequenced, because we know the sequence was good.

And using these examples will help you then become more competent in adapting and developing your own structure.

Okay, hopefully that's clear.

This is what you need to complete.

You're going to replace point one, point two, point three with specific details of what's going to be in those different points.

You're going to have some ideas for your intro, some ideas for your conclusion, and you're going to checklist that you have done everything in terms of considering logos, pathos, ethos.

We're ready, it's over to you.

Well, so we have now thought about a question, generated our ideas.

We've put them into a sequence, and we've also considered the breadth and depth of our response as well as the tone that we're trying to adopt.

Thank you for your focus today.

All that remains for me to say is, enjoy the rest of your learning.