ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how a rhetorical public speaker develops a relationship with an audience. A “relationship” means more than simply letting an audience know a speaker’s identity and his or her qualifications. A relationship is something personal that involves an emotional attitude toward another person or group and negotiates their reciprocal identities. This chapter explores the strategies that can be used to develop a relationship between speaker and audience that is most conducive to persuasion. Starting with the classical definition of ethos as a combination of goodwill, practical wisdom, and virtue that make us think a speaker is credible and trustworthy, this chapter moves into more specific concepts that help define ethos, including persona, evoked audience, identification, distinction, and polarization.
