18 Persuasive Speaking

Have you been asked to give a persuasive speech but are struggling to find a topic? You might initially think about large, seemingly intractable issues like abortion, immigration, and gun violence—and feel reluctant to weigh in. While there are ways to engage such issues, you might find momentum in tackling more local problems in your community.

Ask yourself, What bothers me about my hometown or city or about my college experience? Who is struggling or suffering, and how can I advocate to improve their situation?

When Priyanka asked herself these questions, she thought about her time on the college basketball team. She loved playing and was proud of herself for not dropping out when so many of her friends stopped playing sports. But she wondered why so few women still competed compared to men. Her concern grew when she saw the results of a 2022 poll by Women in Sport in her social media feed. The poll of 4,000 teenage kids found that “43% of teenage girls who once actively engaged with and enjoyed sport were being side-lined in their teenage years and made to feel not good enough, compared with just 24% of boys of the same age.” Priyanka knew then she had a topic for her persuasion speech.

Persuasion is the strategic use of verbal and nonverbal symbols to influence the beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action of an audience. It is the form of communication most closely associated with rhetoric—and the form of communication we most often hear. In this chapter we first explain the importance of persuasion for civic engagement. We then walk through the six-step persuasive process before concluding with tips on how to organize your persuasive speech.

The Importance of Persuasion for Civic Engagement

Persuasion is a necessary and important aspect of civic engagement for at least three reasons: It helps audiences make decisions, more fully explore ideas, and enact democracy.

First, in many cases, diverse audiences will not arrive at a consensual decision after reviewing the facts, trade-offs, and value dilemmas of a complex and difficult issue. Advocacy is necessary to move audiences toward a position or conclusion. Persuasion can play a critical role in how communities decide a city might best address sanitation challenges, how a jury resolves a legal dispute, or how citizens choose who to vote into office.

Second, advocacy often helps us see the greatest advantages—and disadvantages—of an idea. Listening closely to someone passionately argue for a position can help us appreciate an idea more fully, or it can crystallize our reasons for rejecting it.

Third, as we gestured to in chapter 1, rhetoric (and persuasion as a subset) is necessary for democracy.  When advocate for what we believe is the public good, we try to convince fellow community members that our ideas are meritable. Persuasion is, ultimately, how we enact democracy, such as Priyanka’s attempt to convince her audience to improve gender equity in sports.

Persuasion, however, can be negatively perceived as a form of manipulation—a perception that has plagued persuasion, and rhetoric more generally, since at least the classical period. Given the goal of persuasion—attempting to influence others—it is easy to understand why it has been subject to special scrutiny. We contend, however, that ethical persuasion is essential for civic engagement for the reasons we have provided. To help you deliver an ethical persuasive speech, we turn next to steps you should take to develop your presentation.

Because persuasion is everywhere, being critical and aware of persuasive techniques will allow you to both ethically persuade audiences and evaluate arguments when others attempt to persuade you.

The Persuasive Process

Taking an idea and developing it into a compelling persuasive appeal can be envisioned as a six-part progression, enumerated in box 18.1. This chapter will walk you through all six steps.

Audience Analysis and Adaptation

The persuasive process begins with studying your direct audience and tailoring your speech to them and the environment where the speech will occur. In chapter 2, we defined the direct audience as the people who are exposed to and attend to your speech. Review chapter 2 for help with analyzing and adapting to them. As you take each step in developing your persuasive speech, make choices that consider this audience.

Your direct audience is central to your persuasive presentation. In fact, if you were to deliver the same ideas to two different direct audiences, then you would prepare two different speeches. The more the two groups diverge, the more distinct your speeches would need to be because what is likely persuasive for one audience in a particular environment may not be effective for another group in a different setting.

Persuasive Goal

A speaker must keep their goals clearly in mind when crafting a speech. You might think about achieving multiple goals: to advocate for change, to seek the public good, and to convince your audience to adopt a specific belief, attitude, or action.

Advocate for Change

The goal of persuasion is change. That might seem obvious, but it’s a major contrast from the goal we discussed in chapter 13, which covered informative speaking, as well as chapter 15 on deliberative presentations. When speaking informatively or deliberatively, you strive to educate your audience fairly and robustly. This chapter focuses on persuasion. Consequently, your goal now is to convince your audience to adopt your desired belief, value, or action. That means you must push your audience to change.

Do not choose a goal your audience is already fulfilling because then persuasion isn’t necessary. For instance, it’s likely that Priyanka’s audience already agrees that girls should be encouraged to play sports. It’s less likely they all agree that colleges should focus on hiring more female coaches as role models in men’s and women’s athletics.

Seek the Public Good

Even when focused on the goal of persuasion, you’ll want to keep in mind your overarching goal of improving your community and the public good. A speaker motivated solely by personal gain may say anything to persuade their listeners, and their presentation will seek to directly benefit themselves. Think of a stereotypical used car salesperson who manipulates customers into buying defective cars because the salesperson earns a commission.

In contrast, a speaker motivated by the public good will aim for outcomes that benefit the whole group—not only themselves and their direct audience but also their implied and implicated audiences. In chapter 2, we defined an implied audience as a group that is represented in your message and an implicated audience as those affected by your speech if it is persuasive. You should keep both groups in mind by continually asking for whom or what you are speaking. It is easy to begin with the best of intentions and then get caught up in winning or only advantaging yourself as you develop and deliver your speech.

Specify the Belief, Attitude, or Course of Action You Want the Audience to Adopt

In addition to advancing the public good and striving to persuade, you must identify your more specific persuasive goal. This goal should shape—and be reflected in—your thesis statement. (Look back to chapter 3 for a discussion about thesis statements.) We offer three types of persuasive goals to kickstart your thinking: speeches that attempt to persuade the direct audience to adopt a particular belief, attitude, or course of action.

One type of specific persuasive goal is to target an audience’s belief: their conclusion about, or confidence in, what is or is not true or real. Scholars of public speaking and debate call this a “fact” proposition. The following are examples of thesis statements that target beliefs:

• Global warming is caused by human activity.
• Excessive exposure to social media worsens mental health.

Notice how the wording of both examples focuses attention on convincing the audience that a particular belief or conclusion is true or real. Alternatively, you can convince an audience to reject a belief they hold that is not true or real. For instance, you may claim that sugar does not make kids hyperactive.

A second type of specific persuasive goal is to change an audience’s attitude: their feeling or moral judgment about what is good or bad, right or wrong. Scholars refer to this as a “value” proposition. In chapter 15, we defined a value as a principle or quality that human beings are committed to and upon which they base their thinking and decisions regarding important issues. A speaker might propose, for example, the following:

• Tattoos and piercings are healthy forms of self-expression.
• Oklahoma’s penalties for carrying or consuming small amounts of marijuana are too harsh.

You can hear the emphasis on a value or attitude with words like “healthy” and “too harsh.”

A third type of specific persuasive goal strives to impact the audience’s course of action: their choice, behavior, or support for specific policies or procedures. Scholars also call this type of claim a “policy” proposition. The following are examples:

• Public high schools should be required to offer students a financial literacy course.
• We should use the word “unhoused” instead of “homeless” to describe people without a physical address.

While you don’t have to use “should” to indicate a course of action, that word is an easy way to communicate your emphasis on affecting behavior or policy.

Whatever specific goal you choose, work on its wording. Your goal (and thesis statement) must clearly communicate what you are targeting and how you want your audience to change. As you determine your goal, also decide what specific actions the audience should take to empower them to enact that change.

Empower Your Audience: Provide a Means to Act

Whenever possible you should empower your direct audience by giving them a means to enact your goal. Your audience should not just accept your thesis; they should act on it. This means offering listeners clear options they can take to reinforce or act on their beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action.

The type of action you advocate depends on your specific persuasive goal. If your objective is to change your audience’s beliefs or attitudes, then you might ask the audience to participate in an activity that will help accomplish that goal. Very often that activity will be educational in nature. Such activities further expose audience members to a supportive point of view without yet requiring them to actively back a change in policy or change their daily behaviors.

If your goal is to influence the audience’s course of action, then ask them to help you enact your policy or plan. Encourage them to adopt the desired behavior, help put the procedure into action, or assist with laying the groundwork to enact the policy. This is often called a call-to-action and should answer the following questions:  What should the audience do if they are persuaded by your perspective? What actions can and should they take that can support your policy proposition?  Moreover, you should ask yourself: what is a reasonable action that my audience can take? If you’re unable to brainstorm a meaningful call-to-action, review your thesis statement to determine how it connects and relates to your audience.

Whatever your goal, keep in mind that most actions are of two types: already existing opportunities and opportunities that you create.

First, there are already existing opportunities that you need to discover and then encourage or enable your audience to participate in. For instance, if you are concerned with girls dropping out of sports, not having sufficient role models, or suffering from stigma if they continue to play sports, you can do the following:

• You might ask the audience to volunteer to mentor local youth.
• With a little searching, you will likely discover several such mentoring programs already existing at your school and the surrounding area (Boys and Girls Club, tutoring programs, community centers, etc.). You simply need to contact the organization to assess their needs and discuss the details about how to get involved.

Second, there are opportunities that you create. Sometimes you need to use your imagination and creativity to offer your audience a chance to get involved. For example, you might want the audience to increase the budget for your college’s women’s basketball team.

• You could ask your audience to help organize and execute a donation drive on campus.
• Or you might invite the audience to join you in a meeting with the athletic director to solicit more funding.

Whenever possible, find or create an opportunity close at hand for the audience—whether that is on campus or in your city or town. Your audience will be more likely to take advantage of the opportunity, and doing so will help them notice ways to directly improve their local community.

Of course, finding or creating local opportunities can seem challenging at first. To help, we recommend you become familiar with the nearby community:

• Talk to local residents about opportunities.
• Search for your issue on the local visitors’ bureau web page or government websites. Such searches are likely to identify local organizations and groups devoted to the issue.
• Watch for announcements of upcoming events in the local news and on campus.
• When you find a local connection, interview someone associated with it. People regularly involved with the issue are likely to offer great insight and provide ideas about ways citizens can get involved.

Once you have chosen a specific action to advocate, give the audience the detailed information they need to participate. The key is to reduce the burden on your audience and prove they can truly make a difference.

If you begin the persuasive process by analyzing your audience and then thoughtfully choosing your goal and empowering your audience to act, you will be on your way toward producing a persuasive speech that will compel your audience and aid your community.

Invention: The Substance of Persuasion

We’ve explored the first three steps you should take when developing a persuasive speech: (1) consider audience analysis and adaptation, (2) select a persuasive goal, and (3) empower your audience to act. Basically, we suggested you start by knowing your audience and then, using that information, determine what you want them to think, believe, or do and give them the means to carry that out.

Now, we explore the last three steps to prepare your speech: (4) invent the content of your speech, (5) frame your persuasive efforts, and (6) refute counterarguments. Together, these steps will help you develop the speech content that fulfills your speech goal. 

Invention is the process of investigation and thought that produces the content of your speech. This designation originated in rhetoric’s ancient past, but we still use the term. It emphasizes that when we speak, we make up or “invent” arguments intended to persuade. Of course, when done properly—and ethically—your words and arguments will be based on thorough research and credible sources that you credit through citations as described in chapter 4. Ultimately, though, you come up with what you say in your speech.

How do you stimulate your thinking? How do you overcome writer’s block to construct your speech? This is precisely what the canon of invention is designed for. We will guide you through central proofs or means of invention you can adopt to develop the substance of your persuasion.

Modes of Proof: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos

Aristotle’s three artistic modes of proof—ethos, pathos, and logos—are an important part of the inventional process in persuasive speaking. By modes of proof, Aristotle simply meant the ways people are persuaded or what they find persuasive. In differentiating the modes, Aristotle explained that

• ethos is found “in the character of the speaker,”
• pathos relies on “disposing the hearer a certain way,” and
• logos depends on “the thing itself which is said, by reason of its proving, or appearing to prove, the point” (Aristotle, 1823, p. 10).

In each case, the proof is the persuasive appeal you share with your audience. Depending on the goal, audience, subject matter, and occasion, you will vary the proof you use.

Whatever your specific persuasive speaking goal, you should employ all three aspects of invention—namely, logos, ethos, and pathos—to accomplish it. In the previous chapter, we explained that your specific persuasive goal will be to change your audience’s beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action. Some students mistakenly think speeches that target beliefs rely solely on logos while speeches that try to change attitudes only utilize pathos and so on. Such thinking confuses the end goal with the means used to achieve it (i.e., tools of invention). Whatever your end goal is, you can and should make use of all three available modes of proof. Let’s turn briefly to each next.

Logos

Sound persuasion is based on evidence and valid reasoning. In Aristotle’s words, this is the work of logos. Logos is the logical or reasoned basis of an appeal. Thus, for our purposes, logos refers to the argumentative substance of the presentation. Argumentation constitutes a type of proof to convince audiences to accept your message. Because this aspect of public presentations is fundamental, we made it the focus of chapters 5 and 6. However, argumentation is only one mode of proof.

Ethos

Persuasion is also a matter of credibility or ethos. As described in chapter 5, ethos is drawn from the audience’s perception of the speaker’s credibility. When an audience perceives you as credible, or “worthy of confidence,” they are more likely to be persuaded by you. In other words, your credibility functions as another form of proof of the validity of your argument.

Notice, however, that your ethos exists only to the degree that your audience perceives you as credible, and their perception is based on how you present yourself in and through your speech. You may have established a public reputation that precedes your speech, but you must further develop, reinforce, and/or improve your ethos in and through each presentation you make.

According to Aristotle, speakers can develop their ethos by demonstrating one or more of the following four qualities through their speech (Rieke, Sillars, & Peterson, 2009, pp. 155–156):

• competence (expertise, preparation, intelligence)
• trustworthiness (moral standing, integrity)
• goodwill (having an audience’s best interests at heart)
• dynamism (charisma)

We are persuaded by advocates and sources that best display these qualities. Consequently, Priyanka, for example, might stress her experience as a lifelong athlete and member of the basketball team (competence) as well as her desire for all student athletes at her college to be treated fairly (goodwill).

It’s important you spend time cultivating your ethos because, according to Aristotle, moral character (ethos) offers the most effective means of persuasion (Aristotle, p. 11). You might consider why and whether you agree with him.

Pathos

Finally, there is the role of emotion or pathos. Recall from chapter 5 that pathos is concerned with the psychological state of the audience and rests upon effective, ethical appeals to their emotions and motivations. Practically speaking, pathos is a measure and reflection of the extent to which we are moved by and feel invested in a topic and a message. Those feelings constitute another form of proof of the validity of the speaker’s case.

Feelings may be appealed to or cultivated in a multitude of ways. Aristotle makes the intuitive argument that we desire emotions that result in pleasure and want to avoid emotions that result in pain. A speaker can use this observation when crafting their message:

• Perhaps they associate the problem they are targeting with painful emotions. Aristotle listed such painful feelings as anger, fear, shame, shamelessness, contempt, pity, indignation, and envy.
• A speaker can elicit pleasurable feelings in relation to their desired solution. Aristotle named such pleasurable feelings as patience, friendship, confidence, and kindness.

Of course, these are only a sampling of possible emotions you can elicit and ways you can use them in your speech.

Box 18.6 Pathos in Practice

The effective use of pathos can be seen in Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Muffet McGraw’s April 4, 2019, response to a reporter’s question. The question was prompted by an interview published earlier in which McGraw critiqued the prominence of men hired as coaches in women’s sports, especially college basketball, and defended her own all-female coaching staff. On this occasion, the reporter asked her, “How seriously do you take being that voice,” referring to being a voice for women.

McGraw answered by eliciting indignation about the current inequity. She explained, “We’ve had a record number of women running for office and winning and, still, we have 23% of the House and 25% of the Senate. I’m getting tired of the novelty of the first female governor of this state; the first female African American mayor of this city. When is it going to become the norm instead of the exception?”

She then expressed anger and shame about the state of things: “Girls are socialized to know when they come out, gender roles are already set. Men run the world. Men have the power. Men make the decisions. It’s always the men.” Moving from broader society to sports, McGraw offered hope that athletics could help improve conditions for women: “When these girls are coming out, who are they looking up to tell them that that’s not the way it has to be? And where better to do that than in sports?…Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach them to watch how women lead? This is a path for you to take to get to the point where in this country we have 50% of women in power.”

Her use of hopefulness was then joined by confidence in her practice of hiring women and a return to anger about the problem. McGraw’s response exemplifies the range of emotional appeals available to a rhetor when advocating for a policy change and, especially, the effective association of painful emotions with the status quo.

Clearly, appeals to pathos are potentially very powerful. Consequently, it is this dimension of rhetoric—emotional appeal—that has caused some scholars to distrust rhetoric. The concern is that rhetoric can obstruct good decision-making by displacing reason with emotion. We have certainly seen examples of speakers who rely excessively on emotional appeals and frequently on the emotion of fear. For instance, we see scare tactics in accusations of immigrants overrunning our borders and committing crimes or claims that our legal system is persecuting innocent officials and turning a blind eye to guilty leaders. Although emotion can be overused, it is a valuable part of deliberation and a corrective to an idealized, coldly rational perspective.

Because invention regards the core appeals and content of your speech, its methods and results should inform the next several steps in the persuasive process. In other words, use modes of proof and persuasive appeals to help you frame your persuasive efforts and refute counterarguments.

Framing Persuasive Efforts

Recall from chapter 15 that framing is the process by which people use language to present and make sense of their world. We identified three parts to any framing of a civic issue. Every frame identifies or defines

• the problem (i.e., what’s wrong),
• its cause (i.e., who’s to blame), and
• the solution (i.e., what should be done).

We also discussed how to use deliberative framing to set up a deliberative presentation. We concluded that since such presentations are educational, a speaker must frame the problem and possible solutions as clearly and fairly as possible.

You will now be involved with advocacy, however, whereby you will try to influence your direct audience’s beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action. Therefore, you should employ persuasive framing in your speech. As we explained in chapter 15, persuasive framing occurs when a speaker strategically names or defines a problem (and its cause) in a way that sets up their desired solution as effective and reasonable. Indeed, you will need to frame the civic issue you are addressing as worthy of the audience’s attention and your solution as a reasonable and superior response to the problem.

Demonstrate the Issue as Worthy of Attention

Unless you can convince your audience of the issue’s seriousness, they won’t have reason to change their beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action. You can demonstrate seriousness in a few ways: Characterize the problem as a violation of the audience’s shared values, narrow your focus, offer compelling evidence of the issue’s existence, and illustrate how the problem affects your audience’s lives.

Violation of Values

First, it is often effective to depict the problem as a violation of the audience’s shared values or commitments. In chapter 15, we defined a value as a principle or quality that human beings are committed to and upon which they base their thinking and decisions for important issues. You can employ the power of values in persuasion by explaining how the problem is violating your audience’s values and commitments. This strategy is effective whether your specific goal is to influence the audience’s beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action.

Box 18.7 Framing the Issue as a Violation of Values: Sample Argument

A good example of persuasive framing can be found in the rhetoric we considered earlier by McGraw. Recall she had said earlier that as head coach for Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team, she only hired female coaches. That statement stirred controversy, resulting in her being asked more about her policy.

When prompted by a reporter, McGraw could have presented her argument in terms of its effectiveness (her team was headed to the Final Four) or the disproportionate amount of male staff in college sports.

Instead, she framed her case in light of national gender inequity. She opened by referring to the US government’s failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). As she reminded the audience, the ERA was introduced in 1967 to make sex discrimination unconstitutional, but it failed to gain sufficient state support to pass.

She then turned to congressional and local leadership by noting how few women are in the House of Representatives or Senate or are even governors or mayors. At that point she asked, “How are these young women looking up and seeing someone that looks like them, preparing them for the future? We don’t have enough female role models. We don’t have enough visible women leaders. We don’t have enough women in power.”

McGraw established the problem as a vast breach in fairness and gender equity nationally and locally. By establishing the disparity in female leadership as a national and enduring violation of shared values, McGraw’s practice of hiring female staff for women’s sports teams seemed both reasonable and practical—a small place to start, so to speak. Notice, too, that framing her hiring practice as helping alleviate the problem depicted McGraw as a kind of innovative problem-solver and encouraged the audience to identify with her desire for equality and fairness.

Narrow Focus

Second, narrow your focus so your audience perceives themselves as capable of making a change. Avoid making an issue seem so immense or difficult that you give the impression that nothing can be done. For instance, it would be a tall order to convince your audience in ten minutes that all women’s sports should be funded equally to men’s sports. It would be more realistic to whittle the problem of gender inequity in sports down to a topic like pressures on girls to quit sports in larger numbers than boys or on the relative lack of media attention to women’s sports compared to men’s.

Compelling Evidence

Third, further demonstrate the issue as worthy of your audience’s attention by offering high-quality, tangible evidence of the problem or community concern, whether that be through a reliance on

• logos, which demonstrates the scope of a problem through statistics;
• pathos, which appeals to the emotional and human toll of an issue and highlights specific examples; or
• ethos, which is generated when a subject is explained through credible sources and testimony.

Ideally, a combination of all three types of appeals and evidence forms the strongest presentation.

Direct Effects

Finally, relate the issue directly to your audience by showing how and where it is evident in their lives and communities. Such an approach will not only create audience understanding but also heighten audience identification with the issue.

Emphasize the Superiority of Your Response

Another element of framing is to present a good way to respond to the problem. It isn’t enough to demonstrate that the issue is worthy of the audience’s attention. You must persuade them of the change in belief, attitude, or course of action you want them to adopt in response. Here you clearly restate your thesis and emphasize the superiority of this response to the issue.

Spend time explaining how the desired belief, attitude, or course of action would address the problem. What will it improve, solve, or help? How might recognizing the reality of internet addiction enable sufferers to get help? How would eating locally grown produce improve the city’s economy and possibly the health of its residents?

As you explain, support your explanation of how the desired outcome will improve the problem with evidence derived from examples, statistics, and testimony. Don’t make the audience take your word for it. Use the research methods we discussed in chapter 4 and employ the argumentation skills from chapters 5 and 6 to strengthen your case.

Also, ensure that the solution aligns logically with your presentation of the problem. Somewhat like the relationship between a question and an answer, you must frame the issue so that the problem (and its cause) sets up your solution as effective and reasonable.

Refute Counterarguments

By its very nature, a persuasive presentation will encounter resistance. You are attempting to persuade people to think or act in a way that is counter to what they are presently doing. Listeners generally have reasons they disagree with your perspective—some good, some bad.

To persuade an audience to change its mind, you must address their reasons. If you ignore common counterarguments, or claims and reasoning that oppose your own, the audience is more apt to ignore you. They will feel like you haven’t challenged their perspective and may think you are uninformed about the topic. As a result, an important component of nearly every persuasive speech is attention to counterarguments.

One option available is to explicitly acknowledge a counterargument by stating it and then refuting it—that is, giving the reasons why you think it is invalid or weak. You might even devote a main point of your speech to refuting one or more counterarguments.

The benefits of acknowledging counterarguments are many: It makes your argument more persuasive to those with opposing views, it shows you are prepared and thoughtful, and it demonstrates you are willing to confront difficult choices.

However, acknowledging counterarguments can backfire if you commit two common mistakes:

1. First, while you have a responsibility to refute counterarguments, don’t feel obliged to make the counterargument. That is, don’t provide evidence that proves the opposing position. Too often this reinforces the opposing view held by those in your audience. This is an additional way persuasion differs from deliberation.
2. Second, avoid adopting the language or phrases used by people who argue against your position. Otherwise, you will unwittingly reinforce the counterargument. For example, if you argue on behalf of undocumented workers but refer to them as “illegal aliens,” it will be difficult for your audience to think of them as anything other than violators of the law who deserve to be punished. Once you adopt the words of a counter perspective, you are arguing at a disadvantage. Instead, find a different language to express the counterargument and your refutation.

We have outlined six steps in the process of developing a persuasive speech. While the steps by no means compose a comprehensive template, they do cover the basics of the persuasive process as you move from analyzing your listeners to refuting popular counterarguments. Now that you have developed the raw material for your persuasive speech, let’s discuss how to put it all together using the Monroe’s Motivated Sequence organizational pattern.

Organizing Persuasive Speeches

Organization plays a key role in comprehending an argument. Chapter 7 on organizing provides you a nice starting place to decide which organizational pattern is best suited for different speech types. In this section, we discuss organizing persuasive speeches with a focus on propositions of policy.

Think back to step 2 where you determined your persuasive goal. You now must decide, “what organizational pattern best helps me achieve my goal?”

For propositions of fact or value, you might select a categorical organization. Essentially that means that you will have two to four discrete, separate arguments in support of the proposition. For example:

Proposition of Value: Using generative artificial intelligence in higher education is unethical

1. Generative AI use facilitates cheating
2. Generative AI use erodes creativity and critical thinking
3. Generative AI content replicates biased ideas and misinformation

For propositions of policy, the problem-solution organization pattern is commonly used. We do not typically feel any motivation to change unless we are convinced that some harm, problem, need, or deficiency exists, and even more, that it affects us personally. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” In a problem-solution pattern, you can spend ample and organized time outlining the consequences to inaction, i.e. the problem.

Although a simple problem-solution organization is permissible for a speech of actuation, you will probably do well to utilize the more detailed format called Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.

This format, designed by Alan Monroe (1951), is based on John Dewey’s reflective thinking process to consider audience listening patterns. Monroe’s Motivated Sequence involves five steps, which should not be confused with the main points of the outline. Some steps in Monroe’s Motivated Sequence may take two points. Each step is described below:

• Attention. This is the introduction, where the speaker brings attention to the importance of the topic as well as their own credibility and connection to the topic.
• Need. Here the problem is defined and defended. It is important to make the audience see the severity of the problem, and how it affects them, their family, or their community. The harm or need can be physical, financial, emotional, educational, or social. It will have to be supported by evidence.
• Satisfaction. A need calls for satisfaction in the same way a problem requires a solution. Not only does the speaker present the solution and describe it, but they must defend that it works and will address the causes of the problem as well as the symptoms.
• Visualization. This step looks to the future either positively or negatively. If positive, the benefits from enacting or choosing the solution are shown. If negative, the disadvantages of not doing any-thing to solve the problem are shown.
• Action. In the action step, the goal is to give specific steps for the audience to take as soon as possible to move toward solving the problem (i.e. your call-to-action). Whereas the satisfaction step explains the solution overall, the action step gives concrete ways to begin making the solution happen.

The more concrete you can make the action step, the better. See box 18.5 above about writing a detailed call-to-action. Research shows that people are more likely to act if they know how accessible the action can be. For example, if you want students to be vaccinated against the chicken pox virus (after establishing that it is a key public controversy), you can give them directions to and hours for a clinic or health center where vaccinations at a free or discounted price can be obtained.

With any organizational pattern selected, it’s imperative to group your main points around clear claims that are supported with evidence and explained with a warrant. As you develop your persuasive arguments, stay appraised of who your audience is and best practices for persuasion.

Conclusion

Persuasion is important to civic engagement because it helps audiences make decisions, more fully explore ideas, and enact democracy.  Use the six-step persuasive process detailed above to help you develop a compelling persuasive argument and consider using Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to structure your policy propositions. Persuasive speaking is an opportunity to share a passion or cause that you believe will matter to society and help the audience live a better life.