Week 12 — Move Them Honestly: Build Your Persuasive Speech — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 11 of the term — build your persuasive speech on a roster topic as a Motivated Sequence, give it one honest move for each appeal, aim it at your target audience, rehearse its last two steps twice, and explain to a friend where persuasion ends and manipulation begins.

This week you learned persuasion and manipulation, the three persuasive questions, the three appeals, Monroe's Motivated Sequence and the target audience, and the four honest moves and four manipulation moves. In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's examples, explain each one, build the persuasive speech you will really give, and explain the idea to someone who has never taken a speaking course. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Speech Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles. It builds on Week 5's organizational patterns: the Motivated Sequence you named there is the shape you build here.

The task

This week's shared example is the running speech in its persuasive form, which is illustrative and attributed to no one. Chapter 12 builds it. Its specific purpose is "To persuade my audience that our campus dining hall should run a two-week plate-waste audit before deciding whether to remove trays." Its satisfaction step is a two-week audit, weighed daily. Its need and logos moves use two oral citations from the course's mini-source set, and each complete oral citation names who, what, and when. Chapter 12 also walks through an illustrative chatbot draft that credits a "cuts food waste in half" line to an official-sounding group with no page behind it, reports only half of the trayless study's finding, warns that the landfill is about to overflow because of trays, and ends with "Remove the trays this week, before it is too late."

Choose your own persuasive topic from the course's roster: a campus recycling program, a later library closing, a community garden on a vacant lot, a pedestrian crossing near campus, a first-year mentoring program, covered bike parking, a hands-on first-aid workshop at orientation, or a later campus shuttle. Do not reuse the plate-waste audit; that one is the course's example.

Work these four problems, and show how you reached each one:

1. The running speech's audit runs for 2 weeks, and the plate waste is weighed on each of the 7 days in a week. How many days of weighing does the audit plan?
2. The persuasive running speech says 2 of the course's oral citations aloud, and each complete oral citation names 3 parts: who, what, and when. How many citation parts does the speaker say aloud?
3. A speaker plans the emphasis of each of the 5 steps of Monroe's Motivated Sequence separately for each of 3 target audiences: agreeing, neutral, and opposed. How many step plans is that?
4. In the illustrative chatbot draft, the speaker catches 1 fabricated statistic, 1 suppressed half of a finding, 1 out-of-proportion fear, and 1 false deadline. How many problems does the speaker catch?

Beside each answer, add one brief explanation, and use your own persuasive speech for the parts that ask for it:

• Problem 1: state your own claim on your roster topic and sort it as a question of fact, value, or policy, naming the word or feature that shows it. Then write your specific purpose, starting "To persuade my audience", with one idea.
• Problem 2: write one honest move of your own for each appeal, ethos, pathos, and logos, and say where each one's proof lives. For the logos move, find one real source yourself, open it, and write its complete oral citation naming who, what, and when before the evidence. Use only a source you have opened and read yourself.
• Problem 3: outline your speech in the five steps of Monroe's Motivated Sequence, in order, one line each, with a visualization step the audience can picture. Then name your target audience as agreeing, neutral, or opposed, say how you shift the emphasis for it, and state the strongest counter-argument fairly with your answer to it.
• Problem 4: in the illustrative chatbot draft described above (you do not need to open any tool), name its four manipulation moves and the honest move that fixes each. Then deliver your own visualization and action steps out loud twice and name one moment that changed between the two takes.

For Problem 4's two takes, you choose how to capture them: a video on your own phone, an audio-only recording, or no recording at all, with a trusted listener who tells you one moment that changed. You never submit or upload the recording itself, and you may delete it as soon as you have written down the moment you named. Nerves before a persuasive speech are normal; a slow breath and a first line you know well both help.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend wants their apartment building to add covered bike parking and plans to tell the tenants' meeting, "Vote yes tonight or every bike in this building gets stolen." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, the difference between persuading people and pushing them around; the three kinds of reason a listener says yes to; what an honest ask would sound like instead; and one limit, such as only using a figure your friend can show a real page for. Explain any course term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible; this message is scored with Problem 4.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who wants the team to switch to a shared calendar and plans to say, "Everyone else already switched, and the old system could crash any day." Model answer: "Right now you are trying to rush people instead of convince them. Tell them about the two meetings we missed last month, which is real evidence they can check, and say you have been the one fixing the mix-ups, so they know why to trust you. Help them picture a week where nobody double-books a room. Then ask for one small, honest step: try the shared calendar for one week. Leave out the crash warning unless you can show where it comes from."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own wording and examples.

Show how you got each answer. A reader should be able to check every total and every label without guessing which numbers you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single piece of work containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and the brief explanation the task names for that problem;
• your claim and specific purpose, your three appeal moves with your oral citation, your five-step outline with your target audience and counter-argument, your critique of the chatbot draft, and the moment you named from your two takes; and
• your message to the friend, explaining in everyday words persuasion versus manipulation, the three appeals, what an honest ask would sound like, and one limit.

Keep it to roughly one to two pages. Clear and specific beats long. You do not submit the recording of your takes; the moment you name is the evidence.

Choose how you show it. Present your work as written text, as a spoken explanation recorded as audio or video of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled outline with a written description. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counting, the planning, the explanations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. Problem 4 asks you to critique a described, illustrative draft; you do not need to open any tool to do it. Every source you cite must be one you opened and read yourself. Submitting AI-generated work as your own or copying another student's work is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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