What Is a Persuasive Speech?

A persuasive speech is meant to influence audience members’ attitudes, beliefs, values, and/or behavior by appealing to some combination of their needs, desires, interests, and even fears. When you speak persuasively, you want to produce some shift in the audience’s emotions and reasoning about an issue—to arouse interest and perhaps motivate action for an issue or cause, or to strengthen (or weaken) beliefs about a certain controversy. Whatever the topic, the goal is to modify or reinforce the audience’s attitudes and beliefs about the issue in question to more closely match that of your own.

Persuasive Speeches Attempt to Influence Audience Choices

Similar to informative speeches, persuasive speeches also serve to increase understanding and awareness. They present an audience with new information, new insights, and new ways of thinking about an issue. In fact, persuasive speeches do all the things informative speeches do. But unlike the informative speech, which seeks to enlarge understanding, the explicit goal of the persuasive speech is to influence audience choices.2 These choices may range from slight shifts in opinion to actual changes in behavior.

CONDITIONS FOR CHOOSING A PERSUASIVE PURPOSE

You should select a persuasive purpose if:

  1. ______ 1. Your goal is to influence an audience’s beliefs or attitude about something.
  2. ______ 2. Your goal is to influence an audience’s behavior.
  3. ______ 3. Your goal is to reinforce audience members’ existing attitudes, beliefs, or behavior so the audience will continue to possess or practice them.

Persuasive Speeches Limit Alternatives

Any issue that would constitute the topic of a persuasive speech represents at least two viewpoints. For example, there are “pro-choice” advocates and “right-to-life” advocates; there are those who prefer a Samsung Galaxy over an iPhone. With any such issue, it is the objective of the persuasive speaker to limit the audience’s alternatives to the side the speaker represents. This is done not by ignoring the unfavorable alternatives altogether but by contrasting them with the favorable alternative and showing it to be of greater value or usefulness to the audience than the other alternatives.

ETHICALLY SPEAKING

Persuasive Speeches Respect Audience Choices

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Even though persuasive speeches present audiences with a choice, the ethical persuasive speaker recognizes that the choice is ultimately the audience members’ to make—and he or she respects their right to do so. People take time to consider what they’ve heard and how it affects them. They make their own choices in light of or despite the best evidence. Your role as a persuasive speaker is not to coerce or force your listeners to accept your viewpoint but to present as convincing a case as possible so that they might do so willingly. For instance, you might want to persuade members of your audience to become vegetarians, but you must also respect their choice not to adopt this path.

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Persuasive Speeches Serve as Guides

Persuasion is a complex psychological process of appealing to human psychology. But getting people to change their minds, even a little, is challenging and requires considerable skill.3 As in informative speeches, therefore, using audience analysis to make your message personally relevant to the audience is crucial in persuasive speeches. However, regardless of how thoroughly you have conducted audience analysis or how skillfully you present your point of view, rarely do audiences respond immediately or completely to a persuasive appeal. An audience can be immediately “stirred,” as the Roman orator Cicero put it, with relative ease. However, producing a lasting impact is a more difficult matter. Changes tend to be small, even imperceptible, especially at first.

Research confirms that you can increase the odds of influencing the audience in the direction you seek if you:

Persuasion is both ancient art and modern science, with roots in Greek and Roman rhetoric, as persuasion was first named, and branches in social scientific inquiry. Following is a brief overview of how the first students of rhetoric in the Western tradition, and Aristotle in particular, viewed the process of persuasion. Many of their ideas about how to persuade an audience remain as relevant now as then. Following that discussion is an overview of several leading contemporary theories of persuasion. Both classical and contemporary perspectives recognize that successful persuasion requires a balance of reason and emotion, and that audience members must be well disposed toward the speaker.