How to Create a Persuasive Speech

Delivering a persuasive speech can be a daunting task. Convincing in life in just a few minutes is much more complicated than giving an informal speech simultaneously. Knowing how to write a persuasive speech will help you fully prepare and successfully dominate an argument that grabs your audience's attention. Let's take a look at a few factors that make persuasive speech original.

Students believe that strong and convincing speeches must contain a quote. No, it is not necessary. An excellent persuasive speech can do without them, even a propaganda speech. If we do not have a ready-made quote or cannot find it quickly, you should not waste time searching for it.

Yet, the numbers add the oratorical speech of truthfulness, argumentation, and trust in the speaker. But the numbers themselves are simple data that mean nothing. They can be interpreted and manipulated in different ways. Therefore, the speaker's task is not just to bring numbers, but together with the text that comes before and after they are voiced, convey the meaning that he needs. This should be considered at the stage of preparation of the speech. We have already told a few secrets, we move on to other writing stages.

What Does Persuasive Speech Mean?

"Talk so that I can see you" - these words are attributed to Socrates. This phrase is perfect for describing the meaning of a term. Persuasive speech is a special skill through which the speaker can convey an idea, message, and goal intended for a particular circle of listeners. A speaker can inspire, motivate people to act, and influence opinions, feelings, and behaviors through a persuasive speech.

The principles that persuasive speech should have:

1. Statement of a Specific Purpose: if the speaker explicitly expresses his idea, which is also supported by the audience, then he will be able to motivate people to do things and get the result that the speaker expects.
2. Adaptation to listeners' attitudes. The speaker will be able to convince the audience faster by formulating goals and presenting information, focusing on the principles and worldview that the audience adheres to. Therefore, when preparing, it is essential to know which audience you will have to speak to.

Persuasive Speech Types

The type of persuasive speech may depend on what idea or topic you want to convey to the public. We have prepared four types and propose to consider them in more detail.

Factual Persuasive Speech

This type is based on whether you have correctly selected the topic, thesis, whether you have supported it with arguments, facts, and evidence. Your task is to convey a specific idea to the public, where you will prove that it is accurate or, on the contrary, refute it. Let's look at a small example for clarity. One of the students chose the theme of his introduction, "Flight to the Moon." As a basis, he took the astronaut Neil Armstrong, who successfully flew to the moon in 1969. His words will be reinforced with facts, evidence, illustrations. The student can prove that this particular flight was once completed. This means that he managed to create a factual persuasive speech since his idea is not disputed. People will believe him, will listen to him because he speaks the truth.

Value Persuasive Speech

This type is also based on proving a fact or refuting, but it has its characteristics. Here you need to consider the problem from the moral and ethical side, ask questions, and find answers. Let's look at an example for clarity. Once upon a time, there was the death penalty all over the world. After a while, it was canceled. Do you think the death penalty is morally permissible, or is it considered immoral? When you express your opinion on a given problem, it will be considered valuable persuasive speech since you will feel the situation from morality and ethics.

Policy Persuasive Speech

This is a particular type used during political debates. Politicians deliver speeches to prove their intentions to the public, to make people believe their actions, to support a candidate in elections. Consider a very famous example. The President of the United States does not like how the country's foreign policy is arranged, then he convenes Congress and holds a public speech, where he beckons to change some rules. It is straightforward to distinguish between persuasive policy speech because the name speaks for itself. It is not recommended to use this type for speakers who are not related to politics.

Sales Pitch Persuasive Speech

This type of speech is needed for people in the field of trade. The salesperson's speech must be literate. Such phrases: "We will form the best individual offer for you in terms of price and quality" will be perceived more skeptical than such "This is the best offer on the market right now." Therefore, when preparing scripts and templates for conversation, it makes no sense to write in the pretentious, bookish language.

Main Purpose and Function Persuasive Speech

The primary purpose of the persuasive speech is by influencing the views, convince people of the correctness of this or that opinion, this or that point of view. Any logical proof consists of three interrelated elements:

• thesis (thought or position, the truth of which must be proved);
• arguments (grounds with which the thesis is substantiated);
• demonstration of the proof (logical reasoning, which is used to derive the arguments).

In order for students to understand what features, goals, manipulation persuasive speech has - consider the general elements. First, you must understand that how you communicate with the public will determine the result. Therefore, one of the main goals is communication. Secondly, the ability to speak so that your words are followed is a unique opportunity to prove to all that you are a leader. Therefore, another goal is to control the listeners, to influence their thoughts. The concept of the whole presentation, the genre of speech, language means, and techniques for attracting attention will depend on the goal you set for yourself.

Convincing

It would help if you spoke convincingly. Voice is one of the primary means of influencing the audience. The voice is characterized by strength, pitch, timbre, melodic sound, and some other qualities and shades that make it possible to express a wide variety of feelings and moods. According to experimental data, our hearing can distinguish up to 10 thousand shades of the human voice.

Vocal strength is essential to the speaker. If the speaker speaks softly, only the nearby audience will hear. The rest either stop following the performance or force themselves to listen attentively, resulting from them quickly getting tired of speech. An excessively loud, incredibly loud voice irritates the listeners, quickly gets bored.

The voice's tone and sound play an essential role in the perception of speech. Your voice will sound differently depending on what mood you are in, what state you are in. Speech rate is the speed, the speed with which the speaker pronounces words, sentences, and the entire text. Usually, the beginning of a speech is pronounced more slowly, as it establishes contact with the listeners, sets them up to perceive the material.

Actuation

Another goal of yours is actuation. There can be many reasons for a speaker to influence the audience and call them to action. But the main thing is not the reason. The result is your goal, namely the feedback from the listener. Let's consider in what ways you can influence human actions:

• influence the opinions of listeners and convince that your thoughts are reflections of their ideas;
• intrigue the public with interesting facts, information, thereby making it clear that your words are true and they have meaning;
• do not pressure the public with your persuasion. Always leave a choice because no one likes it if someone is trying to convince. Find a way that makes the listener come to the same conclusion that you do. For example, conduct a small experiment with the help of a spectator;
• reach mutual understanding. This can be done in the following way: you ask what is interesting to the viewer and adjust to their answer, thereby they will hear what they want, and this will bring you the desired result;
• encourage, give prizes, positively evaluate the public. The listener likes to be praised for something; they consider it a reward from the speaker. So you will get closer to the goal and prove that you can be followed.

Stimulation

For the reader to heed your call, you need to think about the incentive. A person is built in such a way that he does not like to perform unnecessary actions. Incentives are essential in the motivational process.

Stimuli are external factors that increase the intensity of certain motives in a person's actions. Incentives are the reward, promotion, managerial influence, fear, responsibility, desire for self-expression, and many others. Thus, incentives are goods that can satisfy the needs of a person when he performs specific actions. You have to supply some incentive to the audience.

With the help of stimulation, favorable conditions are created to satisfy needs. Stimulation is only one of the means of motivation, and it is less often used as a means of controlling people because speakers tend to forget about this element. We recommend that you use our advice.

Important Elements of a Persuasive Speech

Any persuasive speech is possible subject to the existence of several fundamental elements:

• thesis - this element must be formulated clearly; it must remain unchanged throughout the speech and not contain a logical contradiction. As arguments, you need to use verified facts, statistics, opinions gleaned from authoritative sources, examples that are suitable for the case;
• gestures and facial expressions have outstanding opportunities for conveying information and convincing listeners. Gestures are used at the moment when it is necessary to revive the speech, to enhance its expressiveness, to emphasize the expressed thought;
• Presentations can be used to explain numbers, processes, comparisons, relationships, show how something or someone looks like, or provide visual evidence of something. These can be graphs, photos, diagrams, videos. We recommend that you look at speech writing samples; perhaps you will find ideas that you did not use in your document.

Where to Start With Writing a Persuasive Speech?

Preparing for any presentation starts with defining persuasive speech topics. In this case, various situations are possible: either they are offered to speak with a specific topic, that is, the topic is given, or you choose speech topics yourself. In the first case, the speaker only needs to specify it. It is more difficult to define and formulate your topic of speech.

Further, it is necessary to clearly understand why, for what purpose the speech is delivered, what kind of listeners' reaction you are trying to achieve. Do you want to explain, describe, or tell? Or do you want to change your mind or convince your audience to do something? That is, you formulate a goal. After these two steps, it is necessary to collect material on the topic. If the speech's content is taken from personal experiences, the material can be selected from many sources.

Read not one but several magazine articles, gather information from not one but several of them. Expand the points of view of various authors, compare them. Chat with others, write down thoughts and facts that come to mind, and about which you read.

The last step is creating a plan. It is important to immediately determine what specific issues you intend to cover in your speech. Therefore, a preliminary plan is drawn up, reflecting the speaker's definition of the speech topic and the approach to this problem. In the process of studying the literature, analyzing the selected material, the plan may change, and in any case, it will contribute to your work. Now you know how to start a speech. Then you will learn how to choose a topic.

What Should a Good Persuasive Speech Topic Be?

As for the speech topic - it should be bright, relevant, exciting, and eye-catching. It doesn't matter if it evokes negative or positive emotions. The main thing is that it is so strong that the listeners can remember the very sensations that they experienced in the hall. Also, the topic must be useful and thought-provoking.

When you have decided on the topic of your speech, you need to formulate it. It should always be remembered that a well-formulated topic can tune the listeners, preparing them to perceive the speech. The name must correspond to a whole list of requirements. It should be as straightforward as possible and as short as possible. Long titles that include unknown words and phrases can alienate the audience, sometimes even cause negative attitudes towards a future report.

General names should also be avoided since they imply many issues, which the speaker cannot do. For this reason, among the listeners, there are always dissatisfied people who have not received a detailed answer to their questions. To flesh out the general wording, many speakers use subheadings. The language you define must necessarily reflect the content of the entire speech.

Choose a Topic That You Understand

First, think about those areas of expertise in which you have a memorable experience or theoretical background. Secondly, chat about some exciting topics with your mates or friends. Third, refer to the book. Browse directories, the latest magazines, and newspapers.

We also advise choosing an appropriate topic. Don't choose a dark topic if you're going to tell it in a fun room. The listener's mood depends on the location of the event. Try to get into a neutral mood so that it is pleasant to listen to you, and nothing distracts the listener's attention. In an everyday situation, listeners will perceive the topic of the story as a fairly natural thing. Still, at a meeting of a group of people, they may find it interesting, funny, shocking.

Choose a Topic That Interests Listeners

The topic should be interesting enough, necessary enough, understandable, and sufficient for the audience. To decide whether it will meet these requirements, it is essential to know ​​the listeners' level of knowledge, upbringing, age, and special interests.

According to experts in psychology, interest helps a person understand the activity's goals and promotes acquaintance with new information that more fully and profoundly reflects reality. Interests can be social, professional, personal, etc. Knowing which audience the speech will take place in front of, the speaker needs to consider which problems are most relevant for his listeners at present and which are in priority.

Don't Overdo It

Naturally, not with all the ideas that came to mind, you will go to speak. If a week or two has passed and the idea still seems cool to you, then you need to work with it. 70-80% of the ideas that came to the speakers' minds and at first seemed super cool, after a couple of days, they seemed uninteresting. If the topic seems simple, it will be easy to explain and convey it to others.

It is not a secret for anyone that the audience is influenced by many different circumstances, including the specific setting in which the performance is delivered. For example, people attending a corporate party, neither morally nor physically, will not be able to listen to severe reports. On the contrary, they will readily accept what may look tactless, shameless, confuse, or offend listeners in a relaxed atmosphere. For this reason, when choosing a topic, it is essential to consider the specific circumstances where the speech will be delivered.

Essential Steps in Choosing a Topic

Any topic is part of a larger problem and represents one of its sides. It is essential to be aware of this and not strive to embrace the immensity in one speech. When choosing a topic for a speech, one should be guided by the following criteria:

1. You are more knowledgeable in this matter than the audience.
2. Topics might pique their interest.
3. This is relevant, meaningful for everyone.

The speaker should choose worthy topics, accumulate exciting and useful material, choose relevant information, find the main thing, and present it brightly and efficiently. The speech topic should be chosen carefully; it is better to focus on familiar and exciting personalities.

It would help if you did not choose a topic whose idea it will be difficult for you to explain to the audience. If you decide that in an hour or a few hours tell about a problem that covers many questions, then most likely, you will not meet the deadline, and the public's trust will be undermined. The audience should leave you with a sense of delight. Take care of your audience because getting attention is much harder than missing out.

Familiarity

The peculiarity of topics you are familiar with is that it will always be easier for you to prepare a speech. Have you ever noticed how Steve Jobs behaves on stage? If not, then you should pay this attention. He always feels confident because he talks about what he knows perfectly. Accordingly, it would help if you took an example from him. Since you are familiar with the topic, you can also spend more time organizing than looking for information.

Interest

If there is a fire in your eyes about what you do and what you say, we assure you that your passion and enthusiasm will be passed on to the audience. Speaking confidently with zest is a unique skill thanks to which you manage to convey a thought and ignite a fire in the hall; they will not want to let you go and learn more and more information. If the choice is limited, and you cannot choose anything that would be truly interesting to you, choose at least what you like or attract you. This will make it easier to prepare and give a speech.

We want to convey that you do not need to be world-famous to organize a conference and give a speech. The topic you are most familiar with will help you speak convincingly. You can make every effort to improve it and get a grandiose discovery. It will not be difficult to tell the idea in one breath, but your diligence will be appreciated by everyone present. You must understand that the time to seek information can be challenging. But the result is worth.

The Audience's Interest

To be on the same page with the people present at your speech, you need to make sure that every second listener knows what is at stake. Suppose you are a writer and speaker at conferences in front of experienced authors. In that case, it is quite normal to use sophisticated phrases from the fields of philology, stylistics, linguistics, and orthography. If you speak in front of chess amateurs, use only well-known terms that will not raise public questions. We also recommend not to aggravate the details and explanations of words. If people know their meanings, it will be just a waste of time.

Are you sure that you are dealing with professionals in the topic in question? Then go ahead - speak as professionally as possible, here. It is allowed to use terms, phrases that are complex and are understood only by those present. Are you doing debate topics for high school? Speak in a way that will be understood. Again, it is possible to lose the audience's attention by talking about something challenging and incomprehensible and about what they have known for a long time.

Do not forget to think about the audience's needs first because you did the meeting to convey the information to them. Ask these questions: What does the audience want to hear? What is the audience interested in? If it is difficult to answer, then just put yourself in the listener's shoes and write a list of those facts that you would be interested to know. Let's conduct parallels - teenagers are not interested in hearing about the times of the 60-70s; they strive for something new. At the same time, their parents are interested in this time because they grew up during this period. Build on this information and move in that direction.

Visualize

Choose topics that can be visualized or illustrated. It is much more interesting to watch your story if you can form a picture in your head or see it on the spotlight screen. Also, it is a visualization that can significantly influence people's opinions. When there is an example, there is something to see, then they believe you.

Emotional Topics

The audience is pleased to watch the speaker as he tells the emotional story. You will receive a very high percentage of those who will react positively to your conversation if they find a response in their soul. The whole composition is based on emotions and tries to hurt only the positive feelings of the audience.

Desired Outcome

Is it essential for you that the audience gets the result you expected? If so, then this is the aspect that guides you when choosing a topic. If you want the world to have less garbage, give a speech about the need to dispose of waste. Then you will get both the result and the motivation for action. Since the issue of garbage every year, more and more people are worried, most likely they will also turn to the country's authorities and, possibly, hear you and take action.

What Topics Are of Interest to the Public?

Not every person can speak beautifully. However, it is possible to interest the public by mastering the art of rhetoric and exciting topics. That is why we have prepared a list of topics that are interesting to the public.

An interesting topic for a presentation may be related to the economic side. In this case, you can talk about many problems:

1. The World Bank and its Problems.
2. Distribution of wealth.
3. The banking system in the home state.
4. The state of the country's economy.
5. Credit problem.

It will be most exciting for people to hear about what is close to them. Therefore, it is often in the social sphere that a good topic for a speech is usually found easiest. In this case, you can tell:

1. About the main categories of people requiring social protection.
2. About social orphanhood.
3. One of the most important problems in modern society. Here we can talk about drug addiction, alcoholism, smoking.
4. The problem of organizing cultural leisure.
5. Youth behavior.

Nature is also attractive to most people. Here you can come up with many different exciting topics:

1. The problem of uncontrolled deforestation.
2. Environmental pollution by vehicle exhaust gases.
3. The most environmentally friendly mode of transport.
4. Learning energy from ecologically friendly sources.
5. The decrease in the world supply of freshwater.