Ethos Pathos Logos

Every fall students prepare to go back to school and receive an education so they can continue to progress through life and go to higher education opportunities after high school. While all these kids are receiving an education not all of these students make it through high school to even have the opportunity to advance onto higher education. Victor Rios explains the ways in which he feels we can all help the students that he claims, “the education system ignores” in his TED talk titled “Help for the kids the education system ignores.” Rios brings forward an argument of how he feels society should alter their attitudes on those who have dropped out and change those students from being seen as “at-risk” students to “at-promise.” Rios proposes

In this argument Rios is able to establish a sense of ethos by stating who he is and what he does at the beginning of his argument. Rios begins his presentation by telling his audiences, “For over a decade, I have studied young people that have been pushed out of school, so called "dropouts.””(Rios) He also gives the audience more of an idea of his occupation by saying “I follow these young people for years at a time, across institutional settings, to try to understand what some of us call the "school-to-prison pipeline."”(Rios) Including this information for his audiences helps improve his argument because they are now aware that he is a qualified and credible source of information on this topic. Along with establishing ethos, Rios also implements the use of pathos throughout the entirety of his argument. Rios successfully appeals to the emotion of the audience when he presents different anecdotes about his troublesome youth, how his teacher helped him become successful, how he helped a young person and turn him into someone who had overcome adversity, etc. Pathos helps Rios connect with his audience as well as make his stories he provides more vivid. This being considered, Rios is strengthening his argument with pathos and hopefully getting the audience to join his side of the argument. Rios also includes the use of

A strategy that he includes is the implementation of different metaphors to build his argument. Rios begins to illustrate an experience he had in high school where he had a teacher who always reminded him that she was there for him whenever he was ready to open up. Rios later explains the one character his teacher had, “But she understood one basic principle about young people like me. We’re like oysters. We’re only going to open up when we’re ready, and if you’re not there when we’re ready, we’re going to clam back up.”(Rios) The use of metaphors can help bring more familiarity to the audience, and that’s what Rios does when he includes this one. This metaphor helps the audience take the way the young people feel and turn it into something more familiar that the they can better connect to. The audience can then have an improved understanding of the minds of these young people that are facing these adverse situations that drive them out of schools. Making the audience more familiar with the situations helps to make it more personal to them and help them better connect to the argument. When the audience is more connected they are more likely to join Rios’s side on the