Persuasive Speeches: Definition, Examples, Objectives

Persuasive Speech Definition

Have you ever tried to persuade someone to do something? Maybe you tried to convince a group of friends to eat at your favorite restaurant, not that awful pizza place again. Maybe you tried to get your child to stop leaving empty breakfast dishes on the table until the oatmeal turns to cement. Or perhaps you explained to your boss why you should get a raise in light of the great work you’ve been doing.

On the other hand, how often do you feel like you’re being persuaded to do something? You might think of a few recent conversations where someone made a case for something – maybe your friend was trying to convince you to pick them up at the airport, or your child wanted an ice cream.

As you’ve no doubt found, some persuasion works and some falls flat. Persuasive speaking is an art, and to do it well requires planning and practice.

Actually, you’re being bombarded by thousands of persuasive arguments every day. In 2006, the marketing firm Yankelovich estimated that the average American was exposed to 5,000 ads per day (up from 500 in the 1970s).¹ More recently, Red Crow Marketing pegged the figure between 4,000 and 10,000 ads per day. ²  That’s a lot of persuasion! Since we’re constantly fending off efforts to convince us to buy this, or subscribe to that, or vote for this, or click on that, we’ve built up strong defenses against persuasion in advertising, which is intended to benefit the company and not necessarily you, the consumer. If you want to get through to your audience, you have to convince them you’re not selling something. Or not just selling something. You need to make it clear that your listeners are the ones who will benefit in some way by following your call to action.

Persuasive speeches “intend to influence the beliefs, attitudes, values, and acts of others.”³  Unlike an informative speech, where the speaker is charged with making some information known to an audience, in a persuasive speech the speaker attempts to influence people to think or behave in a particular way. This art of convincing others is propelled by reasoned argument, the cornerstone of persuasive speeches. Reasoned arguments, which might consist of facts, statistics, personal testimonies, or narratives, are employed to motivate audiences to think or behave differently than before they heard the speech.

There are particular circumstances that warrant a persuasive approach. As O’Hair and Stewart point out, it makes sense to engage strategies of persuasion when your end goal is to influence any of these things – “beliefs, attitudes, values, and acts” – or to reinforce something that already exists. For instance, safe sex advocates often present messages of reinforcement to those who already practice safe sex and, by the same token, also routinely spread the message to populations who might be likely to engage in unsafe or nonconsensual sexual behavior.

In a nutshell, persuasive speeches must confront the complex challenge of influencing or reinforcing peoples’ beliefs, attitudes, values, or actions, all characteristics that may seem natural, ingrained, or unchangeable to an audience. Because of this, or speakers must motivate their audiences to think or behave differently by presenting reasoned arguments.

Examples of Persuasive Speeches

A persuasive message differs from advertising since persuasion focuses on the benefits to the audience of performing a certain action, or thinking a certain way.  Persuasive speaking happens all the time:

• A community member rallies neighbors to demand that the city replace a broken play structure at the park.
• A child explains to her parents why she should get an extra half hour of screen time today.
• Parents discuss with a teacher why they think their child should have an Individualized Education Program.
• A landscaper talks to her supervisor about the advantages of investing in a new lawn machine.
• A concerned citizen talks to the city council about needing a four-way stop in addition to crosswalks at a busy intersection.
• A group of senior citizens petition the county’s Office of the Aging to extend public transportation hours on the weekends.
• A chemist, along with a group of people with a variety of environmental science experience and training, talks to the town water treatment office about changing the chemicals put into the municipal water supply.
• Parents talk to their children about the importance of being polite and respectful when speaking to others.
• and so on…

The following TEDx talk offers a good example of a persuasive speech.

Here is the video with accurate captions: Stop wasting food Selina Juul at TEDxCopenhagen 2012 (opens in new window).

Persuasive Speech Objectives

Persuasion means to cause someone to do or believe something based on reasoning and argument. Persuade comes from the Latin roots per– (thoroughly, strongly) and suadere (to advise), from the Proto-Indo-European root *swād- (sweet, pleasant, agreeable; like the Sanskrit svadus, sweet or the word suave). ⁴  Persuasion, in other words, is an attempt to make a viewpoint or a behavior agreeable to someone. When your objective as a speaker is to convince your audience to adopt a particular belief or engage in a specific action, something that can benefit them, you are speaking to persuade.

Persuasive speeches may convince, or attempt to influence or reinforce particular beliefs, attitudes, or values. In these speeches, the speaker seeks to establish agreement about a particular topic. Or persuasive speeches may actuate, or attempt to influence or reinforce actions, or motivate particular behaviors.

The overall objective of persuasion is to convince your audience to adopt a particular beneficial belief or action, beneficial to them.  There are different ways to consider motivating your audience to understand benefits, among them those by Reiss and Maslow.

Reiss’s 16 Basic Desires

Psychology professor Steven Reiss developed a theory of sixteen needs and values that motivate human beings.⁵

1.  Acceptance, the need to be appreciated
2.  Curiosity, the need to gain knowledge
3.  Eating, the need for food
4. Family, the need to take care of one’s offspring
5.  Honor, the need to be faithful to the customary values of an individual’s ethnic group, family, or clan
6.  Idealism, the need for social justice
7.  Independence, the need to be distinct and self-reliant
8.  Order, the need for prepared, established, and conventional environments
9.  Physical activity, the need for work out of the body
10.  Power, the need for control of will
11.  Romance, the need for mating or sex
12.  Saving, the need to accumulate something
13.  Social contact, the need for relationship with others
14.  Social status, the need for social significance
15.  Tranquility, the need to be secure and protected
16.  Vengeance, the need to confront or resist those who hurt or offend

With these motivators in mind, you can think about ways to appeal to an audience’s emotions, needs, and values.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

One common approach when designing motivational appeals is to make use of Abraham Maslow’s model of human needs. Maslow arranged human needs into a hierarchy and he insisted higher-level needs on the hierarchy cannot be achieved before lower-level needs are met. What this means for persuasion is that you cannot motivate an audience to address a higher-level need until their lower-level needs are fulfilled.

Maslow’s model of needs in order from low to high level:

• Physiological needs: Food, drink, sleep, shelter.

• Safety needs: Personal protection and safety from threat, crime, dangerous weather, loss of property, etc.

• Love and belonging needs: Love, affection, belonging.

• Esteem needs: Desire for stable, high-evaluation of the self and acceptance by others.

• Self-actualization needs: The need to achieve our highest sense of who we can become.

Although all persuasion deals with motivating your audience to understand benefits to themselves in adopting certain ideas or actions, there are nuances in objective, with persuasion occurring in various forms of advocacy and civic engagement.

George the Poet, a London-born spoken-word performer of Ugandan heritage, reminds us that “Everything you know is a story. An idea that you’ve accepted. Until you cross it out, and replace it with a better answer.”⁶ By bringing new stories, ideas, and solutions to light, public speaking can be a powerful tool for advocacy and activism. Whenever you speak publicly, you are advocating for a certain position. In many cases, you are also trying to activate your audience, encouraging your listeners to change their thinking or behavior in some way, or rally around a common cause.

Consider how many types of motivations this student speaker incorporated into her persuasive speech.

The very foundation of public speaking is rooted in advocacy and civic engagement.  Aristotle framed public speaking, or rhetoric as it was called at the time, as the art of persuasion and said the early study of it would lead a rhetorician to discover all means of persuasion within a given case. So important was rhetoric that it became a discipline of study necessary to take part in the civil society of Athenian Greece.

Today’s form of civic engagement involves seeking out and creating opportunities to listen as well as to be heard, whether speaking at your local city counsel meeting, PTA, or even in front of Congress.

1. First is disinterested deliberation around a public problem. Here the model derives from Athenian citizens gathered in the assembly, the town halls of colonial New Hampshire, and public representatives behaving reasonably in the halls of a legislature.

2. Second is prophetic work intended to shift a society’s values; in the public opinion and communications literature, this is now called “frame shifting.” Think of the rhetorical power of nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, of Martin Luther King, Jr., or of Occupy Wall Street activists with their rallying cry of “we are the 99 percent.”

3. Third, there is transparently interested “fair fighting,” where a given public actor adopts a cause and pursues it passionately. One might think of early women’s rights activists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage. ⁷

Allen organizes the three elements of civic agency along a continuum of interest – the degree to which one is personally invested in or affected by a given issue. For example, if you attend a meeting about improving traffic flow in your city, you may be doing so from a fairly disinterested standpoint. Regardless of your feelings about traffic, you don’t have any greater or lesser personal stake in it than anyone else. However, if the issue under discussion is whether to knock down your apartment building to put in a new freeway, you might have a more interested view of the subject, and you might advocate a different solution, such as improved public transportation. This public advocacy is what Allen calls the civic task of “fair fighting”: speaking up for a cause.

When you ask an audience to consider your ideas, take action, find solutions, or support a policy, you are advocating. Most importantly, advocacy demands that you identify what you hope to accomplish. Wanting change is where advocacy begins, but it requires that you identify the specific changes that you are advocating for. Otherwise, you cannot prescribe behavioral calls to action.

Civic engagement demands that you move beyond your social circles to consider what an oppositional or undecided audience believes, feels, and values. A skilled public speaker then shapes arguments and uses examples and support that will resonate with that audience to deliver a powerful, well-executed, and meaningful speech.

The following video offers a good example of both advocating and civic engagement. In May of 1969, Fred Rogers spoke before the US Subcommittee on Communication to advocate against cutting the PBS budget in half. Committee Chair Sen. John O. Pastore, who was initially adversarial and dismissive toward Rogers, responded to his speech by saying, “I think it’s wonderful. Looks like you just earned the $20 million.”

You can view the transcript for “May 1, 1969: Fred Rogers testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications” here (opens in new window).

Here is the video with accurate captions: May 1, 1969 Fred Rogers testifies before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications (opens in new window).

Footnotes

1. Story, Louise. “(15 January 2007) Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad.” The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/business/media/15everywhere.html
2. Marshall, R. (10 September 2015) “How Many Ads do You See in One Day?” Red Crow Marketing.  Retrieved from: https://www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads-see-one-day/
3. O’Hair, D., & Stewart, R. (1999). Public speaking: Challenges and choices. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 
4. “persuade, v.” “suade, v.,” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/141561.
5. Reiss, Steven. (2004) “Multifaceted nature of intrinsic motivation: The theory of 16 basic desires.” Review of general psychology 8.3: 179–193, 187.
6. George Mpanga (Producer). 01 Sep 2019 Have You Heard George’s Podcast? [Audio Podcast], retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07mk7cx
7. Allen, Danielle. “What Is Education For?” Boston Review, 24 Oct. 2016, bostonreview.net/forum/danielle-allen-what-education.