Reasoning

There are four types of reasoning methods introduced to us in chapter 15; deductive reasoning, inductive, casual, and analogical. When I read about these and looked back at recent persuasive conversations that I have had with others I noticed two of these four reasoning methods most commonly used by me, which were casual reasoning, followed by deductive reasoning. I recently tried to persuade my friend to start working out to deal with her fatigue. Her response to me was that it doesn’t make sense for her to exercise if she’s already tired, it will just make her more tired. I tried to explain to her through casual reasoning that exercise provides your body increased energy so that she wouldn’t feel tired necessarily after exercise but may perhaps benefit from being more tired later at night to allow her to get better sleep. She argued it didn’t make sense. Then I used deductive reasoning in which I presented to her where I showed her examples of articles in which people that exercised experienced greater amounts of energy, concluding to her that she would experience the same.

The 4 types of Appeals

Chapter 15 describes four types of appeals that are used by speakers to support claims and they are logos, ethos, pathos, and mythos appeals. Each of these appeals relies on a different method of proving points to support a claim. The logos appeal relates to logical proof, this means that a speaker must present facts and statistics to logically prove their point. The Ethos appeal is an appeal that relates to how credible the speaker is. If throughout the speech the speaker presents enough solid facts then this appeal could be used. An appeal to the emotions of the audience would correspond with the pathos appeal in which the speaker must stimulate the audience’s feelings to uphold a claim. This appeal may not just work on its own and may need a combination of another appeal to win the favor of most audiences. An appeal to certain cultural beliefs, Mythos, may be a difficult appeal to present to an audience unless the speaker can directly relate it to a commonly known cultural tale, song, rhyme or etc.

Immersed in a Sea of Persuasion

We are surrounded by persuasive messages everywhere in our daily lives. We are persuaded to do things by the media, our family and friends, and also through hearing others speak. The media immerses us in a sea of persuasion through advertisements. Commercials are made in a way that persuade us to make certain purchases, sometimes even showing a competing brand of the same product, telling us to pick one over the other for various reasons. Our family and friends also use persuasion in order to get us to do something. Examples of family and friends immersing us in a sea of persuasion could be everyday simple things such as a mother persuading her children to do their chores, or getting good grades by using methods of persuasion. We encounter persuasion almost every day with our friends who constantly try to talk us into things. Speeches are heard by many, an example would be the recent elections in which many politicians used the methods of persuasion to gain votes. A listener must identify what they are trying to be persuaded about and weigh out the positives and negatives that go along with their actions along with outcomes.

Types of Audiences

When presenting a persuasive speech, a speaker can come across a number of types of audiences. The book discusses five different types that are the negative audience, positive audience, divided audience, uninformed audience, and the apathetic audience. We all might hope that we are granted a positive audience, which is an audience that not only knows about your topic but also favors it. A negative audience is one that is informed of your topic but does not favor it. To help present to a negative audience a speaker can work to establish further credibility or choose a more common ground approach. A divided audience is full of listeners that are informed and half are favorable while the other half are unfavorable, to help address this type of audience a speaker can acknowledge the reasonableness of both sides. An uninformed audience is not informed of your topic therefore they do not hold an opinion, and an apathetic audience is informed but just really doesn’t care. To help with an apathetic audience the speaker must really work on gaining the audience’s interest.

Organizational Patterns

Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is a series of five steps that are attention, need, satisfaction, visualization, and action. These steps draw in the audience’s attention and helps lead them to take some kind of action. The first step attention is simple, it is relating your topic and speech’s content to gain the audience’s attention. Then is Need which reveals to your audience that action is necessary because there is a certain issue involved with it. Satisfaction is a step that can be seen as a solution to your audience, Visualization shows what can be gained through the solution, so that the audience has a better idea of what their actions can solve. The last step action calls for the audience to want to help this problem and take action. With the Problem/Solution organizational pattern there is not a list of steps to follow but it involves an argument in which the speaker needs to notify the audience that there is some type of problem. Give reasons to why the problem needs to be addressed and how. I think I prefer to use the Monroe’s Motivated Sequence because I like how it clearly states what I would need to address.                

Flickr

As I read through this I did not see exactly the point that was being made. I see nothing wrong with the word girl being used for a woman, and how it is different for men. I don’t see her point as being very valid. The book discusses the wide use of words and how one word may have many meanings. One comment discusses how the woman uses the word girl on her flicker to help others broaden their search. Words like girl and boy are just used under keywords for categories meaning that there can be many connotative meaning for the words some positive and some negative. Some commentators may have been over exaggerating when they refer to have words like girl banned, which I thought was outrageous. There are some people that may attach a negative definition to the word girl or boy, but not only meanings for those words can be taken negatively.