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Persuasion is a complex psychological process of reasoning and emotion, and effective persuasive speeches appeal to not one but both processes in audience members. Emotion gets the audience’s attention and stimulates a desire to act; reason provides the justification for the action.

Persuasive speeches use arguments as a framework for making appeals. An argument is a stated position, with support, for or against an idea or issue. Appealing to reason and logic—or to what Aristotle termed logos—is important in gaining agreement for your argument; it is especially critical when asking listeners to reach a conclusion regarding a complicated issue or to take a specific action (see p. 195 for guidance on constructing sound arguments). To truly persuade listeners to care about your position, however, you must also appeal to their emotions—to what Aristotle termed pathos. Feelings such as pride, love, compassion, anger, shame, and fear underlie many of our actions and motivate us to think and feel as we do.

You can evoke pathos in a speech by using vivid imagery, telling compelling stories (especially ones that touch upon shared values such as patriotism, selflessness, faith, and hope), and using repetition and parallelism (see Chapter 16 for guidelines on using these and other techniques of language in a speech). Consider the following example from a speech by Elpidio Villarreal about the value of immigrants to the United States. In this excerpt, Villarreal movingly relates the story of the death of his uncle, an immigrant from Mexico, during combat in World War II. Villarreal’s vivid imagery and reference to loyalty and sacrifice for country effectively arouse appreciation for Mexican American and other immigrant soldiers:

On June 6, 1944, [my Uncle Lupe] landed at a place called Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. He was killed while leading an attack on an enemy Bunker. . . . I was privileged to walk the battlefields of Normandy, including Omaha Beach, and I visited the great American Cemetery there where lie 17,000 Americans who gave the “last full measure of devotion,” as Lincoln so beautifully put it. Simple white marble crosses, interspersed with occasional Stars of David, stretch out for 70 acres. . . .

I thought about all the brave Americans buried there and of the meaning of their deaths, but I thought especially about my Uncle Lupe, the one who went to war knowing he would die for no other reason than that his country, the one that treated him as a second-class citizen, asked him to.³