What is persuasion?

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From the course by University of Washington

Speaking to persuade: Motivating audiences with solid arguments and moving language

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University of Washington

Speaking to persuade: Motivating audiences with solid arguments and moving language

75 ratings

Course 3 of 4 in the Specialization Dynamic Public Speaking

In the professional realm, we need to be able to argue without being argumentative. Whether you are fundraising for a nonprofit, pitching a business proposal, or suggesting a change to company policy, you are making arguments. In making the case for your topic, you often want to raise awareness, identify a pressing problem, discuss appropriate solutions, and outline specific steps for the audience. To be persuasive, you must be clear (the audience may have little to no existing knowledge), you must be convincing (you are trying to sway the audience that your argument is valid), and you must be compelling (you are trying to motivate the audience enough so that they want to take specific actions). Persuasive speaking thus requires clarity, strategy, topic mastery, plus a sense of style and presence. By the end of this course, you should be able to design persuasive speeches that address problems and solutions and that motivate audience members. You should be able to use rhetorical style strategically and deliver passionate and compelling speeches. Learners will record speeches, providing and receiving peer feedback.

From the lesson

Welcome. Let's develop a persuasive argument.

In this module, we’ll focus on the key strategies for designing persuasive speeches. In examining persuasive speaking, we tackle both solid argument and eloquent writing. After sorting through the broad concerns about persuasion, we start with some of the most powerful argumentative tools you can have: status quo and stock issues. By the end of the week, these two ideas will have helped us figure out what we need to argue (and what we don’t) and how to go about it. If you want some feedback, you’ll be able to upload an introductory speech for peer review.

What is persuasion?4:00

Good persuasion requires careful planning.3:49

Good persuasion involves logos, pathos, and ethos4:59

Good persuasion responds to questions of fact, policy, and value.3:43

What’s the status quo and burden of proof?4:36

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Matt McGarrity
Principal Lecturer
UW Department of Communication

As we begin our work on persuasion, I'd like to start with a few definition.

So, what does it mean to be persuasive?

Now, we might provisionally define persuasion as the deliberate attempt

to affect audience beliefs and behaviors through communication.

So persuasions does deliberate it's not accidental, and

persuasion has audiences in mind.

So our goal is to move them in some type of way, to change behaviors,

beliefs, attitudes, whatever.

This means that the listener has free choice.

At a basic level, we don't persuade people, they persuade themselves.

We just kind of clear the pathway for them.

You can't really force anyone to be persuaded.

Persuasion and force are fundamentally different.

So a mugger who pulls a gun on me and says give me your wallet, he's not persuasive.

Is he influential?

My, yes.

He's going to get that wallet, done and done.

But I didn't want to give him my wallet, and I wasn't persuaded to do so.

I was forced, and that's not persuasion.

By the same token, persuasion's not simply a manipulation or coercion.

So in manipulation, someone deceitfully preys upon the weaknesses of another or

actively deceives them.

So if a used car salesman lies to me about the mileage on a car,

that's not persuading, that's just not true.

Now persuasion and influence are similar, but they're not quite the same thing.

Influence is this really big category.

And on one side of influence, we've got stuff like persuasion.

And on the other side of influence, we've got stuff like coercion.

And then we've got this mad vast middle, and we got a bunch of influential factors

in there, stuff like culture, and history, and modeling.

As a matter of fact, if you want to be influential, there is one thing that you

can do that will significantly improve your effectiveness every time.

One thing, just one thing.

What's that one thing?

Be attractive, be a physically attractive person.

Research has time and time again reinforce attractiveness is influential.

Now, if you are like me, that strategy ain't really a viable one, right?

No one looks at me and is like, I really don't buy his argument, but look at him,

he's just what I want in a man.

He's like an egg, but paler, sunny side up.

So what we'll do is were going to talk about some of the research on influence.

And it's important to know what those factors are, but

we're focusing more on persuasion instead of influence.

So, that's some general ideas.

And I'd say finally, we're working within the medium of speech.

Persuasion and influence can operate in different mediums differently.

So propaganda, for example,

aims to have multiple messages repeating key themes over months and

years on a wide range of medium, print, television, speeches, so on and so forth.

And this is why propaganda's so scary, it's all-encompassing.

Now, a speech has a narrower scope.

We generally need to make the case in a single talk, or maybe a couple of talks.

And we're using primarily oral means.

Now, oral persuasion can be hugely influential.

The ancient rhetorician Gorgias likened it to drugs.

He said, speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and

most invisible body accomplishes most god-like works.

Some speeches cause pain, some pleasure, some fear; some instill courage, and

some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion.

Now that raises the question of ethics.

The ethics of persuasion have always been a bit sticky.

Persuasion is a tool.

It depends on its user, and I like Aristotle's response here.

He wrote, there's no shame in defending yourself from a physical assault.

Why should there be shame in defending yourself from a verbal one?

So in this class, we'll focus on deliberately crafting messages that

openly and honestly attempt to effect audience change.

That means, we have to understand our argument deeply, and

then think about how to adapt it to the needs and concerns of our audience.

[MUSIC]

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