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Week 12 · Module overview

Week 12 — Persuasive Speaking & the Rhetorical Appeals

Public Speaking Free sample edition

Why this matters

A nurse asking a hospital unit to adopt a new hand-off checklist and a neighbor asking a city council for a crosswalk both have to earn trust, make listeners care in proportion, and back the request with evidence the room can check, which is exactly where persuasion ends and manipulation begins.

In plain language

This week your speech stops teaching and starts asking, and persuasion (moving what people think, value, or do, with honest reasons they can weigh) becomes the term's second headline speech. You learn the three kinds of question a persuasive speech can answer. You learn the three appeals (the kinds of reason a listener says yes to): trust in the speaker, a feeling that fits the facts, and evidence. You build the speech in five steps that end in one honest request. And you learn where persuasion ends and manipulation (moving people by going around their judgment) begins.

  • Already covered: audience analysis and common ground (Week 2), the oral citation (Week 4), Monroe's Motivated Sequence as a pattern (Week 5), the informative speech (Week 11).
  • This week: persuasion versus manipulation, fact, value, and policy, the three appeals, the five-step sequence, and the four honest moves.
  • How they connect: the running speech keeps its evidence and turns from teaching to asking.
  • Where we're going next: Week 13, Argument, Reasoning & Logical Fallacies.

Focus

How do you move an audience through its judgment instead of around it?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] sort a persuasive claim as fact, value, or policy and name the three appeals
  • [ ] build a persuasive speech in the five steps of Monroe's Motivated Sequence for a target audience
  • [ ] check a draft against the four honest moves and catch the four manipulation moves

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 12 (about 45 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
  2. Do the tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Speech Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: write one honest move for each appeal on a roster topic, and deliver your visualization and action steps twice.

You've got this

Ask your instructor if a step snags.

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