Concerning ethos, the appeal that relies on the character of the speaker, Pamela Meyer has superb control of the language, speaking slowly, clearly, and often emphasizing key words and “hotspots" used by those trained to recognize deception. Pamela Meyer is a certified fraud examiner. She majored in psychology and political science at the University of Washington before getting her MBA from Harvard Business School. Readers Digest describes her as “the nation's best-known expert on lying”. Meyer is the author of the 2010 book Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception. She tells the audience an anecdote about how once she gained fame or perhaps infamy in her case she cannot even get a coffee date because of her profession. She says,…show more content… She states, “I do not want to alarm anyone in this room but it has come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar and the person to your left is a liar. Also, the person sitting in your very own seat is a liar.” The audience breaks into laughter. The significance of this anecdote is that she establishes common ground with her audience by letting them know humans all lie in some form. The icebreaker is an effective speech strategy that she employed perfectly to get her audience engaged and to listen before revealing some data analysis that can seem monotonous. However, before continuing with the data analysis, she warns the audience of her intentions she wishes to convey with her speech. She believes that lie spotting should not be a game of “gotcha” that is we should not implicate anybody just because we see them twitch their eye. She brings up a TV show called Lie to Me as an example of how lie spotting is wrong. Her goal is to prepare her audience for the reality that there are people out there who are master con artists, and they know how to get information out of you unwillingly by simply asking the right
