Hello and welcome to this lecture on Elements of a Persuasive Speech. Now by the end of this lecture, you will be able to use basic strategies in a persuasive speech. You'll learn how to appeal to emotion, logic, and authority in your speech. And you'll also learn how to use strategies that appeal, or sort of use comparisons, degrees, relationships, circumstances, and testimonials to support an argument. And, you'll also learn how to use inclusive language, such as words like, us and we. Okay, so where do we begin? Well we would begin as usual by thinking about the purpose and the audience of your speech. If you don't know these, then you'll have a very difficult time persuading someone to do something. So purpose, obviously, you should understand, what is it that I want my audience to do? You should define that right off at the bat, right at the very beginning. What is it that I want them to do by the end of this speech, okay? And then understanding your audience, obviously, should allow you to determine what type of strategy you're going to use to convince them to do what it is you want them to do, okay? So that's the very first thing. You need to really think about these. So once you've thought about these things, you should start to think about things like, am I going to appeal to logic? Am I going to appeal to emotion, or am I going to appeal to authority? These are three different strategies that you might want to think about. Now of course, it becomes very important that as you do this, you need to think about possible fallacies. For example, if I rely too much on appealing to emotion, I might have a lot of problems with the logic of my argument, and therefore my argument may not be very persuasive. Think about any kind of advertising that you've seen on TV recently. Quite often they rely a lot on emotion to convince you that the product is a good product. However, if you start to analyze the commercial a little bit, you'll realize that there's not a lot of logic in their argument. Quite often, it's a good idea to use a combination. You might want to appeal mostly to logic, but you could bring in emotion and authority to make your presentation more persuasive. So, it's a good idea to consider using a combination. And that can then make your argument a little bit more persuasive, and you then should just think about how you might support your argument, whether through evidence, examples, data, comparisons, contrasts. We'll get into a little bit more about that later, but that's where you should start thinking about how you will support the argument. And then, you want to tell them, well how will all of this lead up to an action? What action should you take? I've convince you that you should do this. I've shown you why, now I'd like you to do this, okay. Let's go back to the audience and purpose and the things that I mentioned to you. I talked about appealing to logic. I talked about appealing to emotion, and I talked about appealing to authority. But let me go into a little bit more detail about what I mean by these three things. So let's first look at logic. What should I consider when I'm trying to appeal to logic? Well, obviously you should consider, do I make sense? If I'm talking about A, and I'm trying to get you to move from point A to point B, is it a logical step? If this, then that, is that logical, for example? So you need to make sure that your argument has some logical reasoning. But it's not just that, you need to be able to support it. You need to be able to support it with evidence. Other support that you might want to consider is examples or perhaps data that you might have. The important thing is you begin with an argument. You show the logical connection between things and how you got to that argument, and you support that with relevant data whether it's evidence or examples. Okay, let's get to emotion. Now emotion's another common strategy in trying to persuade someone to do something. And usually with emotion, you're trying to manipulate the audience's emotions. You're trying to get them to feel something, happiness or anger or excitement. And are you hoping that that will get them motivated to do something. And there are different ways you can do this. A common way is to tell stories. You might tell them a story, a very short story or depending on the length of your speech, a long story to get them motivated and show them the relevance of what it is that you want them to do. But you also might want to allude or draw on their status, right, show how it will elevate them and raise their status in something. Or you might want to touch on their values and show that you have a common value with them or a common belief. So this is another way of appealing to emotion in an argument. And of course sometimes you might want to use what we call emotive words. And emotive words are very strong words, words that carry a lot of emotion. Quite often they'll be in the form of adjectives or adverbs, and they stir, they create a lot of emotion in your audience. So, you might rely on this. Think of a lot of commercials that you've watched recently. They'll often rely on strong, emotive words to convince you that their product or service matches your values and your beliefs or your desires. Okay, the other appeal that I mentioned was appeal to authority. Now appeal to authority is where you show that you have an expert opinion about something. And you're trying to impress the audience, and you're using this to support your argument. And, again, I can talk about commercials. Sometimes, if you ever watch a commercial, Colgate, for example, toothpaste, nine out of ten dentists recommend Colgate. Well there it's appealing to authority, all right? If I know that nine dentists choose Colgate, then Colgate must be good. Of course, as I mentioned before, you have to be aware of logical fallacies. Just because nine out of ten dentists in their commercial recommend Colgate, doesn't mean that Colgate is good. So appealing to authority alone might create a logical fallacy in your argument. But still, it is a good idea sometimes to appeal to authority because you want to show your expertise. You want to show that you are the expert and the best person to do what it is that you want to do, and that's why sometimes you'll use this as a strategy. Okay, I want to go back to support and logical support because sometimes when you're supporting an argument, you'll need to rely on certain strategies. For example, you might want to make a comparison where you're indicating the similarities and differences of a product. Or maybe you want to talk about the degree of something and why one product is better than other. Or perhaps you want to talk about the relationship, such as the cause and effect of investing in a business or the consequences of failing to properly brand a product. And you want to talk about the circumstances, such as whether something is possible, or whether something is impossible. And finally, you could also rely on testimonies, so that could bring up on stories to support why your decision has worked in the past in relying on other experts or other experiences of other people. All right, let's actually look at an example now. In this example, take a moment, read the example and analyze it. And think about, well what approach is this person trying to use to convince me of their argument? Are they appealing to authority? Are they appealing to logic, or are they appealing to emotion? Right, so if I analyze this, I can start to think about, well the quality of lifespan of today's smart phone is ridiculous. Right away, this person is using a very strong emotive word. Now I would probably argue that that might be too strong of a word. And you might be careful because it has a very strong negative connotation to it. But nevertheless, this person's relying on a emotive word, so we have appeal to emotion there. But then they start to appeal to emotion in a different way, and that is they're starting to use an anecdote. They're using a story to support their argument. See, here's my evidence. Here's a person who has tried to use the phone and it stopped working after six months. There's my evidence. So it's an anecdotal evidence. Of course, again, like I said, you have to be aware of logical fallacies. An issue when using anecdotes is sometimes, just because one person had that experience doesn't mean the majority. Can you make that sweeping generalization? Perhaps, perhaps not, it really depends on the situation. In this case, it could be a one in a million chance. But then, the person relies on emotion again using a very short sentence where they say six months, all right, six months!, with an exclamation mark, all right. Then the person relies on authority, top experts. Rigorous, there's an emotive word, rigorous quality control, okay. So you can see that this person is using a combination of anecdotes appealing to emotions with emotive words appealing to authority. But there's not a lot of substantial evidence that the xPhone is superior to other phones. Not yet, we're really relying on emotion, and we're really relying on authority to convince people that our product is better. Let's look at another example here. In this example, we are using a lot of emotive words, like loyal customers. And also we're relying on things like families, all right? Families are coming to our restaurant. So we're relying on values, the value of the family. And we're trying to appeal to authority a little bit because people have been coming to our restaurant for a long time. Now notice the inclusive language, and I'll get more to that later. But using inclusive language, like our, is quite important, and we do it later on as well. But we appeal to authority, quality food, and a wholesome environment. Not only is that appealing to authority, but it is also appealing to family values. So, again, here's an argument that we're using language to be persuasive by appealing to emotion, appealing to the audience's family values. And we're also appealing to authority, suggesting that our establishment has quality food. Now I mentioned the use of inclusive language, and that's where you want to consider using words like we or your or us and you. You want to take a you attitude with your audience, especially if you're trying to persuade them of doing something. So words like we, your, your, and us in these sentences include your audience in what you're trying to do. Here's an example of a full sentence, or two sentences, that we use inclusive language. Our company is committed to quality, and your contributions have enabled us to grow. Together, we continue to provide the best service throughout our Asian community. Here you can see the words like you. Now I mentioned the use of inclusive language, and that includes using words like we, your, or us. And that allows you to create some sort of environment where you're including your audience with your mission or your action that you want them to do. No, that's not very good. Now, I mentioned the use of inclusive language, and that includes using words like, we, your, us, and you. You want to take a you attitude when you're trying to persuade someone. Remember, you're trying to convince someone of an opinion, or you're trying to get them to do some sort of action. And if you can show how what you're trying to do is relevant to them, you might want to use language that includes them. So using things that create some sort of sense of community with you and your audience or you and your customers, depending on the context, that will help make your persuasive speech more persuasive. Now, let's look at this example. Our company is committed to quality, and your contributions have enabled us to grow. Together, we continue to provide the best service throughout our Asian community. Notice that we're using words like our and we, and this includes the audience in with your argument. Okay, so we've talked a lot about language and appealing to the audience. Okay, so we've talked a lot about using basic strategies in a persuasive speech. And now you should have an idea of how to appeal to logic and emotion or authority to support your argument. And you should also have an idea that different ways of supporting your argument might require you to make comparisons. It might require you to show contrast and degrees of differences or the relationships, or the circumstances of your action. Or using testimonials from customers or experts to support your argument, and how they can make your speech more persuasive. You should also consider how all of this, a combination of this, is often the best way to proceed and not to rely solely on one strategy like appealing only to the emotions of audience. You should probably use a combination. And you should also consider using inclusive language. Take the you attitude, include your audience in your speech. You want to engage them. You want them to think that you're thinking for their benefit, especially if you're trying to persuade them that they should be doing something. Thank you for watching.
