Career RelevancyPersuasive speaking happens often in professional settings. Knowing how to sway listeners to the ideas that you present will take you far in working with coworkers, superiors, and customers. This discussion covers strategies for organizing your persuasive speaking.Background
Imagine that the company you work for is planning for its annual company celebration, and you have the opportunity to influence the decision on where the event is held. In the past, this event has been held as a picnic, but the company has also successfully hosted trips to theme parks and other attractions in your area. Some of your coworkers want to go to the local zoo, with a discounted rate being offered for all employee and family tickets. The other option is to spend the day at a local marina where there is a park, barbeque pits, and water-related activities available for purchase individually. You see the marina as the better option, but the company is split almost evenly on the matter. You decide to speak up and share why the marina option will serve the employees and their families better, but how do you do that? This is one example of how persuasive speaking strategies can work in your favor.Opportunities such as the one above arise often in workplace settings. Perhaps that example falls more on the side of pleasure than business, but consider the many other workplace decisions that are heavily business related, such as: Deciding between two competing office supply companies for who your companys paper supplier will be. Though both suppliers offer competitive prices, one company has faster delivery, while the other offers more of the products the office already uses.
Deciding with a fellow manager which interview candidate is the best fit for a position
Helping a patient see why it is best he/she comply with a professionally recommended medical regimen
Deciding with a fellow manager whether or not to terminate an employee
Good persuasion is executed through properly organizing your speaking points to have the most effect. You can select the best organization style based on the purpose of your speech. Here are some popular methods: Problem/Solution Order
As the name would suggest, in this style, the speaker presents a problem or challenge, and then proceeds to offer solutions. While this style may appear to be very simple, it is crucial that speakers appropriately highlight the problem; in other words, you must convince the listener(s) that the problem is actually a problem. Perhaps you are speaking at a city hall meeting in favor of building a dog park in your neighborhood. It would be best to highlight how not having a dog park impacts citizens, especially those who are not dog owners.Monroes Motivated Sequence
Created by Alan H. Monroe around 1934, this method follows a standard of steps: Attention, Need, Satisfaction, Visualization, Action. The speaker first commands the attention of listeners and addresses a need they have. Then the speaker offers solutions to satisfy this need and paints a positive picture of the future with the solution provided. Finally, the speaker ends by leaving the audience with a call to action. This method is particularly effective for engaging the audience and moving listeners to action.Cause-Effect
This method seeks to show the relationship between events and phenomena by demonstrating how the effects of the first element have contributed to the next elements existence. This organizational pattern works best when trying to show a relationship between the cause and effect is controversial or unclear.These are just a few of the organizational patterns you can choose from for structuring a persuasive speech. Your intended purpose for speaking will help you to decide which pattern would make your speech the most effective. A few other tips to keep in mind during persuasive speaking include properly gauging the audience and offering evidence to support your claims. If you are speaking to a department in a meeting or to a small group of coworkers during a training, and you find that your listeners are agreeing with the case you are making, it is appropriate to adjust your momentum to intensify their agreement with you, thus moving them to act. Similarly, if you see that your listeners are in opposition to what you are proposing, you can gain momentum again by emphasizing your credibility, building common ground with your listeners, or even refuting counter-arguments. The inclusion of evidence, statistics, and other factual pieces will add weight to your arguments as well as your credibility (UMN, 2016, para. 26).ReferencesUMN. (2016, September 29). Communication in the Real World: An Introduction to Communication Studies. Retrieved April 10, 2018, from http://open.lib.umn.edu/communication/chapter/11-2-persuasive-speaking/PromptSelect two organizational methods for persuasive speaking and identify one drawback to each that can come from utilizing this method. Perhaps you have witnessed a persuasive speech tactics failure and can comment from experience. How would you suggest working around the drawbacks that you identify?For your citation, you might use articles that show examples of drawbacks that can occur during a persuasive speech. You can also find articles from experts that suggest how to work around drawbacks that occur during different organizational methods in persuasive speaking. Just paste your text into your post, then highlight what you want and use the Text Color tool (circled in red) to change the color.
