The Persuasive Speech - PowerPoint Presentation

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The Persuasive Speech

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Classic Persuasive Appeals: Using Proofs

Pathos: Proof by Emotion

Aristotle taught that successful public speakers identify and appeal to four sets of emotions in their listeners.

Including: anger/meekness, love/hatred, fear/boldness, shame/shamelessness.

You can evoke these emotions in a speech by using vivid descriptions and emotionally charged words.

Pathos functions as a means to persuasion not by any persuasive power inherent in emotions, but by the interplay of emotions-or desire- and sound reasoning.

Relying solely on emotion as a means to persuasion will fail most of the time.

Emotion gets the audience’s attention and stimulates a desire to act on the emotion; reason is then presented as justification for the action.Slide3

Classic Persuasive Appeals: Using Proofs

Ethos: Proof Through Speaker Character

Aristotle believed that speechmaking should emphasize the quality and impact of ideas, but he recognized that the nature of the speaker’s character and personality also plays an important role in how well the audience listens to and accepts the message.

Ethos= moral character

Based on three elements: good sense (competence), moral character, goodwill.Slide4

Contemporary Persuasive Appeals: Needs and Motivations

Classic Theories of Persuasion describe how appeals to reasoning, emotion, and speaker credibility can bring the audience to the speaker’s point of view.

Persuasive theories suggest that for persuasion to succeed, the message must effectively target (1)audience member’ needs (2) their underlying motivations for feeling and acting as they do (3) their likely approach to mentally processing the persuasive message.Slide5

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

In the 1950’s, Abraham Maslow maintained that each person has a set of basic needs ranging from the essential, life sustaining ones to the less critical, self-improvement ones.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has long been a basis for motivation-oriented persuasive speeches. The principle behind the model is that people are motivated to act on the basis of their needs; thus to persuade listeners to adopt suggested changes in attitudes, beliefs, or behavior, point to a need they want fulfilled and then give them a way to fulfill it.

The theory points to the fact that successful appeals depend on trying to understand what motivates the audience.Slide6
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Persuading Listeners by Appealing to the Reasons for their Behavior

According to expectancy-outcome values theory, each of us consciously evaluates the potential costs and benefits (or value) associated with taking a particular action. We then consider our attitudes about the behavior in question as well as what other people who are important to us might think about the behavior. What we decide will be the expected outcomes become our rationale for acting in a certain way.

Thus when you want to persuade listeners to change their behavior, try to identify these expected outcomes through audience analysis and use them to appeal to your audience.Slide8

Persuading Listeners By Focusing on What’s most Relevant to Them

According to elaboration Likelihood model of persuasion (ELM), each of us mentally process persuasive messages by one of two routes, depending on the degree of our involvement in the message. The 2 types of processing include: central processing and peripheral process.

Central Processing- when we are motivated and able to think critically about the content of a message.

Peripheral Processing- When we lack the motivation (or the ability) to pay close attention to the issues.

Three Principles of ELM include: message relevance, appropriate level of understanding, establish credibility.Slide9

Persuading Listeners Through Speaker Credibility

Three Factors of Speaker Credibility: expertise, trustworthiness, speaker similarity.

When audience members perceive the speaker as someone who has expertise, they are more likely persuaded.

Audiences want more

than information

and

arguments

;

they want what’s

relevant to

them from someone

who cares

.

Speaker Similarity

involves listeners’ perceptions of how similar the speaker is to themselves, especially in terms of

attitudes

and

moral character.