Persuasion is an act or process of presenting arguments to move, motivate, or change your audience. Aristotle taught that rhetoric, or the art of public speaking, involves the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion (Covino, W. A. and Jolliffe, D. A., 1995). In the case of President Obama, he may have appealed to your sense of duty and national values. In persuading your parents to lend you the car keys, you may have asked one parent instead of the other, calculating the probable response of each parent and electing to approach the one who was more likely to adopt your position (and give you the keys). Persuasion can be implicit or explicit and have positive and negative effects. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the importance of ethics, as we have in previous chapters, when presenting your audience with arguments to motivate them to adopt your view, consider your points, or change their behavior.
14.2: Principles of Persuasion
14.3: Functions of the Presentation to Persuade
14.4: Meeting the Listener’s Basic Needs
14.6: Speaking Ethically and Avoiding Fallacies
14.7: Sample Persuasive Speech
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