How to Speak Effectively in Any Setting

Follow along with Professor Molly Bishop Shadel as she details the highlights of this vital series, focusing in this lesson on ethos—“good sense, good moral character, and good will.” Learn how you, as other great speakers have throughout history, can use each aspect of ethos to generate trust, understanding, and support from audiences.

Think of your favorite speech from a movie or play. How does it make you feel? Here, Professor Shadel connects audience emotional response to speech success through pathos. In short, she helps you consider your audience by building a relationship, creating a receptive frame of mind, and avoiding the negative emotions that can undermine your success.

Most humans are single-path thinkers with relatively limited attention spans. Follow along as Professor Shadel concisely addresses the role of logos, or logic, in effective speech organization and delivery. From first impression to final comments, learn to engage your audience, keep the audience focused, and make your argument clearly and succinctly.

Flaws in reasoning, also known as logical fallacies, can derail your arguments by undermining your credibility and the integrity of your position. By learning the specifics of more than a dozen types of logical fallacies, you can become a more effective speaker and a more discerning consumer of information.

Aristotle persuaded his audiences through good character, stirring emotional appeal, and sound logic. He also understood that skill in public speaking could be used to stir up fear and discord. In this lesson, learn more about how propaganda—deliberately false or misleading rhetoric—operates, and how it can be disarmed.

Writing for public speaking is different than writing that is composed to be read rather than spoken. Readers control the environment and the pace; listeners do not. Unpack the common pitfalls and opportunities in writing for speaking and construct a speech of your own that establishes credibility and amicability, grabs your audience’s attention, and makes clear your central premise.