A persuasive speech is a weapon that the speaker uses in order to influence and convince the audience to accept an idea, a belief, an attitude or an action. Just like many other speeches, persuasive speech contains a greeting, an introduction to the topic, body paragraphs and the final conclusion. The components of pathos, ethos and logos can be observed in the speech. Rhetorical devices, tones, and dictions are the basic conventions of a persuasive speech. The target audience of the speech can be specific to a particular group of people based on its topic and it also can address the general public.
Writing persuasive speeches is an important skill for anyone who wishes to communicate their ideas and arguments to an audience. A persuasive speech not only allow the audience to see the surface cause of an issue, but more importantly, it goes further to make the audience understand about why they should care and take action with a certain issue. The key to making a successful persuasive speech is the effective understanding and application of the various rhetorical devices.
Persuasive speech is an important genre because the majority of people use this type of genre to write about a concern and address it to the public. It is also the most effective speech genre and yet the most difficult to write because the author has to be very concise and convincing. In our daily life, people tend to use persuasive speech subconsciously. Even we people are infants, they already know how to use persuasion through the methods of laughing, crying or insisting doing something to express their ideas.
In later phases of life, when we try to defend our beliefs, when we hope to sell an idea or a product, when we want to persuade our parents to allow us to do something, and when we argue about a problem with our friends, we would always use persuasive speech in these processes. The necessity of learning persuasive speech is significant, for it can help people know how to negotiate when they don’t want to compromise and effectively express their opinions to others.
A persuasive speech writer may start a speech by giving a personal anecdote, allusions to art and history or a rhetorical question so he or she is able to create a suspense, building up audience’s expectations and forming a gap to stimulate audience’s interest. In The danger of a single story, by storyteller Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adiche employed many personal experiences to persuade her audience who may have a false interpretation of the world around them, who judge a person or a thing based only on a single story.
She told her story during childhood that all the characters in the western books she read had the similar characteristics: “All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples…” By presenting this example, she demonstrated that there is a false impression that black people couldn’t make contributions to literature since writing books is white people’s privilege. Using a personal story makes it much easier for the audience to grow into the author’s perspective.
While forming the arguments, the speaker may often apply celebrity or authority’s quotations to add credibility to the argument. The speech I Have A Dream by Dr. Martin Luther King is one of the most famous persuasive speeches in the world. King not only addressed the problem that black people still faced racial discrimination today, but also called out for people to fight for equal human rights and racial unity. King started off his speech by eloquently reciting the Gettysburg Address, “Five score years ago, a great American, whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the emancipation proclamation.” By referring to Lincoln’s action, to the historical event of signing the Emancipation Proclamation, King brought example of authority to appeal to the audience’ ethos and made his speech more credible.
In order to appeal to logos, a writer utilizes evidence, statistics and research studies. Giving out the specific number of the cause of a certain issue, the speaker provides solid and concrete reasons to make the arguments better supported and make the speech more reliable. In I Have A Dream, King also referenced the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence to show the gap between the Declaration and the reality. King appealed to logos by analogy. He compared civil rights against the “insufficient funds” to remind people of the existence of inequality.
Pathos is also a very common stylistic and persuasive element in a speech. For example, the author can effectively utilize repetitive phrases and certain styles to highlight the emotions and make it easier for the audience to sympathize with him or her. Pathos is an effective technique that King utilized to engage the emotion of the audience. Parallelism