Personality appeal refers to the moral quality and personality prestige of the rhetorician. Aristotle said that personality appeal is "the most effective persuasion means", so the speaker must have intelligence, virtue, goodwill and other qualities that can make the audience feel credible, because "personality can almost be said to be a dominant factor in persuasion" (Kennedy 1991: 38). "When the speaker's words are credible, he convinces people by his character, because we generally trust good people more in everything" (Aristotle 1991: 29). In his speech, a successful speaker "not only tries to make the audience members enter the emotional state that is most conducive to the success of persuasion, but also shows a personality that can win their respect and trust and appeal to them, and uses the prestige of this personality to influence their decisions" (Liu Yameng 24: 165). Personality appeal is not only a bridge between the speaker and the audience to establish credibility, but also a study of the quality of the credible people considered by the Athenians.
Emotional appeal refers to appealing to the feelings of the audience through understanding their psychology and impressing the audience with words, which is what we usually call "moving with emotion". It is to mobilize the audience's emotions to produce the effect of persuasion, or it is a kind of "emotional arguments", which mainly depends on putting the audience in a certain mood. The speaker exerts certain beliefs and emotions on the audience through tendentious or suggestive sentences to arouse their feelings and finally urge them to take action. It can be said that "the study of emotional appeal is a psychological study of human emotions and a moral concern for human beings to explore and practice the truth" (Herrick 25: 84). In Rhetoric, Aristotle discussed almost all human emotions, such as emotions, worries, jealousy and shame. In his view, emotions are not irrational obstacles that affect people's decision-making, but rational responses to different situations and debate modes. "Aristotle's study of emotion clarified the relationship between human emotion and logical debate … so that emotional appeal is no longer a demagogic sorcery excluded from the door of reason" (Fortenbaugh1975: 17-18).
rational appeal refers to the facts and probable reasoning proofs included in the speech itself, that is, "logical proofs". Therefore, rational appeal is not only the study of rational reasoning, but also the study of speech logic. Aristotle divided rational appeal into "rhetoricalsyllogism" and "example", which were discussed in Chapter 2-25 of Volume II. Strictly logical syllogism is based on necessity and consists of three parts: major premise, minor premise and conclusion. Aristotle's rhetorical syllogism is called enthymeme, and its premise is probable things within the scope of human action. Then, according to this premise, the rhetorical inference of probable proof is obtained. "In modern times, rhetorical syllogism has been regarded as _ truncated syllogism or rhetorical syllogism, that is, it only includes one premise and conclusion, while the other premise is omitted or implied" (Corbett 1971: 73), but it is essentially a deductive argument and an incomplete syllogism. Rhetoric syllogism is mainly used in the art of speech to persuade the audience. The speaker only gives the major premise, and the audience infers the conclusion on the basis of guessing the minor premise. By letting the audience guess what the speaker did not directly indicate or deliberately omitted, they can stimulate their sense of participation.