Persuasion: Content and Subject Matter

1. Persuasion: Content and Subject Matter Goal: To convince someone to adopt an opinion, perform an action, or both Method: Appeal to minds and emotions of audience

2. Learning Targets I can… • explain how the speaker’s language choices and use of evidence and/or rhetorical devices affects the meaning of his/her message. • use language choices and rhetorical devices to evaluate a speaker’s purpose. • evaluate the validity of a speaker’s position based on the logic of his/her argument. • use persuasive techniques to create an argument that addresses a target audience and achieves a purpose.

3. Goals of Persuasion: • To get someone to do something • To get someone to believe something • To get someone to change his/her mind

4. Components of Persuasion: • Goals: Know your purpose. • Target Audience: Know whom you are addressing. • Approach: Know what will trigger your audience into action.

5. Approaches for Content: • Logical Appeals • Fact-basedand provable • Ethical Appeals • Based on sense of right and wrong • Emotional Appeals • Use of propaganda to manipulate audience

6. Logical Appeals: • Expert Opinion: a credible, believable source on a given topic • Expert Witnesses: provide credible and provable testimony that supports writer/speaker’s argument • Facts/statistics: provable data on given topic

7. Ethical Appeals: • Target audience’s sense of right and wrong • Ask audience to follow their moral code and desire for justice

8. Emotional Appeals: • Manipulation through Propaganda or Fallacious Reasoning • Propaganda Approaches: • Bandwagon • Testimonial • Transfer • Name Calling • Glittering Generalities

9. Propaganda Approach: Bandwagon • Peer Pressure: • “Everybody is doing it! Jump on board!”

10. Propaganda Approach: Name-calling • Reject or condemn based on judgment or prejudices • No facts or evidence offered to support stereotype

11. Propaganda Approach: Glittering Generalities • Uses generic words, like democracy, freedom, good, right, or proper, to describe something • Audience assumes speaker is using their definition of the word chosen

12. Propaganda Approach:Transfer • False connection • Carries over authority, connection, prestige of something we respect to something that does not logically connect

13. Propaganda Approach:Testimonial • Famous person makes you want to invest in product • Ex: ProActiv (Justin Bieber), CoverGirl (P!nk, Taylor Swift), GarnierNutrisse (Tina Fey)

15. E-Trade

16. Life Water Lizards

17. Coke