 Are you any good at getting your way when your friends want to go to one place to eat and you want to go to another? Are you able to change their minds? What about asking for favors? Can you usually get people to help you out without resorting to brute force? Let's think about politics. When the conversation turns political, wait, maybe we'd better not tug at that particular thread. The point is that we use persuasion all of the time in our daily lives. The fundamentals that you might use in a conversation where you're trying to change someone's mind about who to vote for aren't that different from making the same case in the context of a speech. In this video, we'll talk about the basic persuasive strategies and some organizational patterns that might be especially useful for persuasive speeches. Let's get started. Truth be told, the principles of persuasion aren't all that different now than when Aristotle was teaching people how to persuade 2,000 years ago. Aristotle argued that three elements need to be accounted for in every attempt to persuade, ethos, logos, and pathos. Roughly translated, ethos has to do with credibility. Audiences want to know that a speaker is trustworthy, competent, and has the best interests of the audience members at heart. You can accomplish this amongst other ways through appropriate appearance, effective delivery, and a high quality of arguments and information. The other Aristotelian modes of persuasion, logos and pathos, have to do with different kinds of appeals. Logos refers to the use of appeals to logic. Generally speaking, we're talking about the use of evidence such as facts, statistics, examples, and testimony. For more information on supporting materials, you can check out our video on research and support. The evidence provided is complemented by the application of reasoning, which connects the evidence to the argument in question. Our video on critical thinking will provide more detailed information on reasoning and the danger of poor reasoning and logical fallacies. Finally, Aristotle advocated for the importance of emotional appeals in persuasion, which he called pathos. Where logical appeals are aimed at the mind, emotional appeals seek to tug at the heartstrings of the audience. Think about the commercials that you see on TV for the ASPCA. They don't just provide a string of statistics about the number of animals and shelters. They show you pictures of the most pathetic looking dogs and cats imaginable in order to create an emotional connection. As important as it is for a speaker to provide accurate and compelling facts, it is equally important to put a face on the topic and help that information to hit close to home for audience members. A persuasive speaker should always be working to find the right balance between all three of the modes of persuasion. While ethos is always critically important, the amount of logos versus pathos necessary for a speech can depend on the topic and the audience. Research tells us that audiences who are opposed to a topic are more likely to be persuaded by facts and evidence, meaning that you should lean more heavily on logos. If an audience is already in favor of your topic, though, you can use persuasion to cement their stance more firmly. To do this, a speaker should boost the pathos in their speech to stoke the fire of the audience's resolve. Now that you understand the fundamentals of persuasive strategy, you can consider which specific organizational pattern will best allow you to apply the modes of persuasion. We discuss some of those patterns like cause-effect, problem-solution, comparative advantages, and topical organization in other videos, so we won't spend a lot of time on those here. There are a couple of patterns that are particularly useful for persuasive speeches that we would like to discuss in greater detail. The first is need plan. Like some of the other patterns, need plan is not overly complicated. The first main point establishes the need for the change for which you are advocating. The second main point details your plan for accomplishing that change. If the need is well known, like the insolvency of the social security system, then you probably won't have to spend as much time explaining why a change is necessary and you can dedicate more time to sharing the details of your plan. If the importance and immediacy of the need are not as clear to the audience, however, like allowing college athletes to unionize so that they can share in revenue, then you'll have to spend more time establishing the need and likely won't have time to get into quite as detailed a description of your plan. The discussion of your plan should also lay out the practicality of your proposal. In other words, you need to demonstrate for the audience that your plan will solve more problems than it creates. If my solution to the social security issue means cutting all funding for national defense, that's a problem that I'll have to be able to explain. Monroe's motivated sequence is the other organizational pattern that is specifically geared for persuasion. Advertisers have been using Monroe's motivated sequence for more than half a century because it's particularly effective at eliciting immediate action from the audience. Motivated sequence follows a five step pattern. I'll describe the steps and show images from a commercial that may help you recognize the pattern. The first step is attention, where the speaker grabs the attention of the audience and lays out the goals of the speech. Next, in the need step, the speaker provides a description of the problem and describes what may happen if the audience does not take action. Third, the speaker outlines their proposed solutions and addresses any anticipated objections in the satisfaction step. The fourth step is visualization. Here, the speaker asks the audience to visualize the potential positive outcomes of action and negative outcomes of inaction using vivid imagery to detail each. Finally, the speaker pushes the audience toward action with a direct appeal and provision of specific and preferably immediate action steps. Did any of that seem familiar? Again, advertisers have been using Monroe's motivated sequence for decades because it can elicit a strong response from the audience when employed effectively. However you choose to apply the strategies and patterns of persuasion in your persuasive speech, it's important to allow for an appropriate amount of planning and preparation. Persuasion is rarely ever simple, even if you're just trying to talk your friends into eating at Taco Bell instead of McDonald's. If you have one of those two ton hideaway couches and you're going to ask me for help in moving it, then you better put some serious thought into how you're going to convince me. And if you want to talk politics, well, we'll save that for the graduate level work.