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 already agree with your perspective, you may try to strengthen their commitment. For instance, your classmates may already believe that there are not enough healthy food and drink options in campus vending machines. In this case, you could seek to convince them to take immediate action to address the problem.

Weaken Audience Commitment. If many audience members disagree with your perspective on an issue, you may attempt to weaken their commitment to their viewpoint. For example, suppose that you support the removal of all fast-food outlets on campus but your audience survey reveals that most of your classmates like to eat at those establishments. Your speech is unlikely to succeed if you advocate a ban on campus fast food. Instead, you could try to weaken your listeners’ commitment to fast food; for example, you might attempt to persuade them that eating fast food less frequently has many benefits.

Promote Audience Action. You also may seek to persuade audience members to take a specific action. Asking students to drink less caffeine, serve on the college’s Library Improvement Committee, or vote for an activity-fee increase would be examples of this type of speech. You also might advocate taking action in the community, such as volunteering to help assemble bags of food for a local food bank.

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