Chapter 17
Persuasive Speaking
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CHAPTER OBJECTIVES
• Learn about the nature of persuasive speeches.
• Understand how to adapt a persuasive message to your audience and how to use ethos, logos,
CHAPTER OUTLINE
CHAPTER INTRODUCTION
• The chapter opens with a student named Michelle attempting to persuade the leadership council of her
sorority to implement a twice-a-week meditation practice. Although Michelle offered information about
how meditation has benefited her, she failed to mention how her proposal would benefit her listeners—
a key element in any persuasive speech.
THE NATURE OF A PERSUASIVE SPEECH
• In a persuasive speech, your goal is to affect your audience members’ beliefs, attitudes, or actions
while also advocating fact, value, or policy claims.
• Persuasive Speeches Attempt to Influence Audience Members.
Depending on your goal, influencing audience members might mean trying to strengthen
audience commitment, weaken audience commitment, or promote audience action.
Strengthen audience commitment.
• If audience members agree with your perspective, you may try to strengthen their
commitment.
Weaken audience commitment.
TAILORING YOUR PERSUASIVE MESSAGE TO YOUR AUDIENCE
• Effective persuasive speakers use strategic discourse—the process of selecting supporting arguments
that will best persuade the audience in an ethical manner.
• Adapting to Audience Disposition
Your listeners’ disposition—their opinions about your topic—should affect the thesis that you
select.
According to social judgment theory, audience members make a decision about your thesis by
comparing it with their own perspectives on the issue.
• Accounting for Your Audience’s Beliefs
Audience members’ beliefs—or the facts about your topic that they consider to be true—will
have a significant effect on their attitude (favorable or unfavorable feeling) toward your thesis.
• Appealing to Your Audience’s Needs
Audience members have needs—objects they desire and feelings that must be satisfied.
Your message is more likely to succeed when it is relevant to the audience—that is, when it
answers their question, “What’s in it for me?”
• Connecting to Your Listeners’ Values
Values are “core conceptions” of what is desirable for our own life and for society.
Because values play a central role in guiding our lives, adapting an argument to audience values is
one of the most important considerations for whether your argument will be persuasive.
• Demonstrating How Your Audience Benefits
Audience members weigh costs and benefits when they decide whether to take action in
response to a persuasive appeal.
BUILDING BLOCKS OF PERSUASION
• Ethos: Your Credibility as a Speaker
Since ancient times, people have recognized that a speaker with ethos (credibility) has far more
persuasive power than one without ethos.
A credible speaker is seen as knowledgeable, honest, and genuinely interested in doing the right
thing for his or her audience.
Understanding the elements of credibility
• The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that practical wisdom and virtue are
major components of ethos.
Building your credibility
• You can build your ethos by doing the following:
o Share your qualifications to speak on the subject.
o Present strong evidence from reputable sources.
o Highlight common ground with the audience.
o Choose words that demonstrate understanding of your listeners, and avoid
Avoiding loss of your credibility
• Here are some common sources of this type of error:
o Getting your facts wrong
o Pronouncing words incorrectly
o Failing to acknowledge potential conflicts of interest
o Stretching to find a connection with the audience
• Logos: The Evidence and Reasoning behind Your Message
Reliable facts can further strengthen your credibility and help your audience members make
well-informed decisions—key effects of ethical public speaking.
When you present trustworthy facts to back your claims and clearly show how those facts have
led you to those claims, you use logos effectively.
Using reasoning
• Reasoning is the line of thought that connects the facts you present and the conclusions
that you draw from those facts.
• Persuasive speakers typically use inductive reasoning, which follows a similar process
of generalizing from facts, instances, or examples.
• There are four types of inductive reasoning:
o Example reasoning
o When you use example reasoning, you present specific instances to
support a general claim.
o To use example reasoning skillfully, be sure to provide enough instances
o Comparison reasoning
o When you use comparison reasoning, also known as analogy
reasoning, you argue that two instances are similar, so that what you
know is true for one instance is likely to be true for the other.
o For comparison reasoning to work, your audience must agree (or be
persuaded) that the two instances are in fact comparable.
o Sign reasoning
o When you use sign reasoning, you claim that a fact is true because
indirect indicators (signs) are consistent with that fact.
Avoiding logical fallacies
• Hasty generalization: A hasty generalization occurs when a speaker bases a conclusion
on limited or unrepresentative examples.
• Causal reasoning errors
o One common error in causal reasoning is the post hoc fallacy, which lies in the
assumption that because one event followed another, the first event caused the
second.
o Also watch out for reversed causality, in which speakers miss the fact that the
effect is actually the cause.
• Ad populum fallacy: You’ve committed the ad populum (bandwagon) fallacy if you
assume that a statement is true or false simply because many people say that it is.
• Pathos: Evoking Your Listener’s Emotions
When used with ethos and logos, emotional appeals—known as pathos—help you put a human
face on the problem you’re addressing.
When you stir your listener’s feelings, you can enhance your persuasive power.
Using emotional appeals
• Humans have the capacity to experience a wide range of emotions—including empathy,
anger, shame, fear, and pity—and each of these feelings provides an opportunity to
enhance your use of pathos in a persuasive speech.
ORGANIZING YOUR PERSUASIVE SPEECH
• In a persuasive speech, you want to choose a pattern that will clearly convey your message and maximize
your persuasive effect.
• Criteria-Application Pattern
A criteria-application pattern has two main points:
• One establishes standards for the value judgment you are making.
• The other applies those standards to the subject of your thesis.
This pattern is commonly used for a thesis that advances a fact or value claim.
• Categorical Pattern
In a categorical pattern, each main point represents a different but important aspect of your
topic.
You could use this pattern for a fact or value claim in which each main point reflects a different
reason why you believe your claim to be true.
• Moore’s Motivated Sequence
The motivated sequence pattern follows the stages of thinking that people go through while
LIST OF KEY TERMS
persuasive speech
claim
fact claim
value claim
policy claim
strategic discourse
social judgment theory
latitude of acceptance
latitude of rejection
boomerang effect
ego involvement
beliefs
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CLASS DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What are the three ways that you might try to influence your audience when you are giving a
persuasive presentation?
• You will give persuasive speeches to influence your audience members’ beliefs, attitudes, or
actions while you also advocate fact, value, or policy claims. However, the strategy that you
use to influence audience opinions changes with your speaking goals.
2. What are the three claims for which persuasive speeches advocate? Provide an example of each.
• A claim is a statement that you assert is true, and your thesis statement should advance one
of three types of claims. Whatever topic your students select, they should be able to
determine if their topic is a claim of fact, a claim of value, or a policy claim.
A fact claim asserts that something is true or false. For example: If taken in excess,
3. What are the three building blocks of persuasion, and how can you apply each of them to your
presentations?
• Since ancient times, people have recognized three time-honored principles of
persuasion—ethos, logos, and pathos. These three principles involve building your own
credibility as a speaker, supporting your ideas with sound evidence and reasoning, and
4. What is the definition of fallacy, and what are several types of logical fallacies? Why should you
avoid them in your persuasive presentations?
• It is important to avoid fallacies when making presentations because they are faulty
arguments. Students should note that the use of fallacies will lead to a loss in credibility.
• The types of logical fallacies include the following:
5. What four patterns can you use to organize your persuasive speech, and what are some examples
of topics you could use for each pattern?
• Criteria-application pattern: This pattern has two main points. One establishes standards for
the value judgment you are making, and the other applies those standards to the subject of
• Moore’s motivated sequence: This pattern follows the stages of thinking that people go
through while solving a problem or considering new ideas. There are five steps in the
motivated sequence:
Attention: Creating a willingness to listen to your message
Need: Identifying one or more needs that are relevant to your audience
Satisfaction: Showing how your proposal will fulfill the need(s) you identified
APPLY YOUR SKILLS
APPLY YOUR SKILLS FROM CHAPTER 17
1. Look at the “Apply Your Skills” activity on page 552 in the text. After students complete the
activity, have them form groups of three to conduct the following activity:
• Person 1: Applying the ethos mode of persuasion, write a script (in the voice of Michelle) in
which you try to convince the leadership council to implement a meditation practice at
sorority meetings.
• Person 2: Applying the pathos mode of persuasion, write a script (in the voice of Michelle)
MORE “APPLY YOUR SKILLS” IDEAS
1. Review the illustration “Smoking Kills …” on page 525 in the text, and write a thesis statement
that could be used in a speech for each scenario. Next, think of a speech topic that you could use for
a fact claim, a value claim, and a policy claim.
3. Review the illustration “Post Hoc Fallacy” on page 539 in the text. What is the individual in the
mask predicting will happen in the two illustrations? Why might you conclude that his expectation
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PERSONAL WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
1. Reflect on a time where you, a friend, or a family member purchased something from an
infomercial. Perhaps you received an “as seen on TV” gift at one point in your life.
2. Reflect on a time when a salesperson or friends convinced you to buy something that you really
didn’t need. What did you buy, and what persuasion techniques did they use to convince you to buy
it? Conversely, think of a time when you convinced a friend or family member to act in a certain
CLASSROOM ACTIVITIES
1. Have students form groups of four or five people, and give each group a random item from your
home. (This could be anything from a wooden spoon to a tape measure.). Instruct students that they
2. Have students form groups of four or five, and give each group a topic. They have to come up
with a persuasive speech topic advocating for a fact, value, and policy claim. (Some topic suggestions
include hunting deer, carrying concealed weapons on campus, raising or lowering the legal drinking
age, raising or lowering the legal driving age, and using e-cigarettes.) Students will have to decide
what direction they want to take with their topics. Give students 15 minutes to complete this
activity. For example:
• Topic: Opioid Use
• Claim of fact: Opioid addiction is on the rise in America.
3. Search for and watch the two-minute video titled “Sarah McLachlan Animal Cruelty Video”
(2006) in class. This video often draws a sad response, which demonstrates persuasion. Ask students
to identify the purpose of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
Then ask them about their emotional response to the video. What strategies did the commercial use
to evoke those emotions? What is the name of the mode of persuasion that calls on emotions? Make
4. Have students form groups of four or five for a one- to two-minute impromptu activity. Have
them select an article of clothing they are wearing or something else they have with them (such as a
laptop, a laptop sticker, or a certain app on their phone) that they can share with other students.
Have them “sell” that article of clothing or other article to their group members. Have one person
5. Have students form groups of four or five, and assign each group a type of fallacy to research.
(The fallacies include hasty generalization, post hoc, ad populum, straw person, and slippery slope.)
If you have more than five groups, two group can be assigned the same fallacy. Give students 20
6. Search for and watch Jennifer Babcock’s two videos on social judgment theory entitled “Pt 1
Social Judgment Theory” (2015) and “Social Judgment Theory Part II” (2015). After watching the
videos in class, give students 15 minutes for this activity. Have students select a partner and pick a
current controversial issue for which they have opposing views. Have each pair of students draw a
straight line (like the one shown on the video) and write what the opposite ends of the spectrum
might look like. For example, if drugs are an issue on campus, a topic like “Random Drug Testing
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ADDITIONAL MEDIA RESOURCES AND ACTIVITIES
1. Watch The Great Debaters (The Weinstein Company, 2007). Have students define Aristotle’s three
modes of persuasion—ethos, logos, and pathos. Then apply each mode of persuasion to a scene in
the movie, demonstrating their understanding of each.
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HANDOUTS AND READY–TO–PRINT ACTIVITIES
Persuasive Organizational Patterns
Place the persuasive speech topics that appear in the following bulleted list into the
appropriate organizational pattern box in the chart below. Then determine the
potential main points that could be used in that particular speech, and write them in
the boxes provided in the chart.
• Fast Food Causes Obesity
• The Need to Implement Safety Measures in the Workplace
• Reasons to Join Greek Life
• Studying Abroad Increase Marketability in the Workforce
ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERN
Criterion-
Application Pattern
Categorical Pattern
Monroe’s Motivated
Sequence Pattern
Problem-Cause-
Solution Pattern
Topic:
Point 1:
Provide criteria. Attention Problem
Point 2:
Provide application. Need Cause