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Articles tagged: credibility

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die packs powerful wisdom that will help you express your message so that your audience remembers it and acts on it.

This article is the latest of a series of public speaking book reviews here on Six Minutes.

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Your speaking ethos is critical to ensure that your audience is present, listening, and open to being persuaded by your ideas.

But, how do you maximize your ethos for a given speech and a given audience? Is ethos fixed before you open your mouth? Is there anything you can do during a speech that makes a difference?

This article shows you practical tactics you can employ to establish and increase your ethos.

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Is your audience listening even before you speak your first words?

Do they have high expectations?

Are they prepared to be convinced by what you have to say?

If not, you are suffering from poor ethos.

The first article in the Ethos, Pathos, and Logos series introduced these core concepts for speakers.

In this article, we define ethos, we look at ways that an audience measures your ethos, and we examine why it is so critical for a successful speech.

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2300 years ago, Aristotle wrote down the secret to being a persuasive speaker, the secret which forms the basis for nearly every public speaking book written since then.

Do you know the secret?

If you don’t, you might be wondering what a 2300-year-old theory has to do with public speaking in the year 2010.

In a word — everything!

In this article, you’ll learn what ethos, pathos, and logos are (the secret!), and what every speaker needs to understand about these three pillars of public speaking.

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Conventional public speaking wisdom states that one should never apologize.

However, I recently argued that there are very few public speaking rules.

  • Is “never apologize” a strict rule?
  • What is the rationale? What’s wrong with apologizing to the audience?
  • Under what circumstances, if any, is it okay to apologize?

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