Persuasion is the process of creating, reinforcing, or changing people's beliefs or actions. When you speak to persuade, you act as an advocate. Your job is to sell a program, to defend an idea, to refute an opponent, or to inspire people to action. The ability to speak persuasively will benefit you in every part of your life, from personal relations to community activities to career aspirations. How successful you are in any particular persuasive speech will depend above all on how well you tailor your message to the values, attitudes, and beliefs of your audience. Careful listeners do not sit passively and soak in everything a speaker has to say. While they listen, they actively assess the speaker's credibility, supporting materials, language, reasoning, and emotional appeals. You should think of your speech as a kind of mental dialogue with your audience. Most important, you need to identify your target audience, anticipate the possible objections they will raise to your point of view, and answer those objections in your speech. You cannot convert skeptical listeners unless you deal directly with the reasons for their skepticism. Persuasive speeches may center on questions of fact, questions of value, or questions of policy. Some questions of fact can be answered absolutely. Others cannot—either because the facts are murky or because there is not enough information available to us. When giving a persuasive speech about a question of fact, your role is akin to that of a lawyer in a courtroom trial. You will try to get your listeners to accept your view of the facts. Questions of value go beyond the immediate facts to involve a person's beliefs about what is right or wrong, good or bad, moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. When speaking about a question of value, you must justify your opinion by establishing standards for your value judgment. Although questions of value often have strong implications for our actions, speeches on questions of value do not argue directly for or against particular courses of action. Once you go beyond arguing right or wrong to urging that something should or should not be done, you move to a question of policy. When you speak on a question of policy, your goal may be to evoke passive agreement or to spark immediate action. In either case, you will face three basic issues—need, plan, and practicality. How much of your speech you devote to each issue will depend on your topic and your audience. There are several options for organizing speeches on questions of policy. If you advocate a change in policy, your main points will often fall naturally into problem-solution order or into problem-cause-solution order. If your audience already agrees that a problem exists, you may be able to use comparative advantages order. Whenever you seek immediate action from listeners, you should consider a more specialized organizational pattern known as Monroe's motivated sequence, whose five steps are based on the psychology of persuasion. Regardless of your speech topic or method of organization, you need to make sure your goals are ethically sound and that you use ethical methods to persuade your audience. In this regard, as in others, you should aim at the highest standards and construct your speech so it will be ethical as well as convincing.
