In ancient Greek and Rome, philosophers and educated people wrote about public speaking when they tried to convince the masses with various strategies, regardless of the truth (sophists). This was strongly opposed by Aristotle, who believed that truth should be the ideal of rhetoric. In his work “Rhetoric”, Aristotle lays out the foundations of skillful oratory. He reveals the strategies of successful speech and claims that a good speaker must be an ”honest and fair man” because such speaker is worthy of trust in relation to a speaker of dubious character. Aristotle emphasizes three persuasion techniques: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos appeals to speaker’s character. Pathos appeals to audience’s emotions in order to change the their opinion. Logos appeals to logic, i.e. reasoning. He stresses enthymeme and example (induction) as the most favourable persuasion methods used by the logos. The aim of this paper is to analyse the features of chosen TED speeches so attention is particularly focused on the topics and messages of speeches, central idea of the speech, linguistic and stylistic characteristics, persuasion techniques (ethos, pathos and logos) and speech structure (introduction, body and conclusion). Analysed TED talks were chosen according to the topic and interest: Ella Dvornik's speech - "When Everything Is Against You, Then You Are on The Right Path", Jia Jiang’s speech – “What I Learned in 100 Days of Rejection”, and Lauren Weinstein’s speech – “Don't Believe Everything You Think”. After a careful analysis of the speeches, it is clear that the first speaker (Ella Dvornik) uses the conversational style of the Croatian standard language (doesn’t strictly adhere to the composition of speech, openly expresses her personality using gestures, jargon, etc.), and she mostly appeals to ethos. The second speaker (Jia Jiang) mostly appeals to logos (speech was easier to follow and more comprehensible than Ella Dvornik’s speech), and the third speaker (Lauren Weinstein) mostly appeals to ethos and logos, respecting speech structure. Each selected speech is interesting, special and attracts attention - the first with non-stereotyping, the second with humor, and the third with skillful oratory.