Good Persuasive Speeches

Preparing good persuasive speeches has several key elements. Among the most important is choosing an ethical speech goal. An ethical speech goal is one that truly embodies the speaker's belief.

The ability of a speaker to deliver good persuasive speeches with sincerity and conviction will, in part, determine how persuaded the audience will be. If you don't believe what you are talking about, why should your audience?

An ethical speech goal also is in the best interest of the audience and honors the choice of the audience.

You may consider it humorous to try to persuade the audience that they should cheat on their schoolwork but making an effective case for it would be difficult because it is an unethical goal.

Similarly, presenting a speech in which you pass a negative judgment on those who do not embrace your beliefs is unethical because it does not honor audience choice.

A second element of preparing good persuasive speeches is to be clear about your purpose and to provide reasons for your audience to agree with you or take the action you suggest. The reasons you provide must be relevant to the purpose and meaningful to your audience.

For example, imagine you are giving a speech persuading the audience to include fruit as a regular part of their diet. Telling the audience that they should eat fruit because it grows on trees is not effective because it is not relevant to the purpose of the speech. Telling the audience that they should eat fruit because ants do is also ineffective because it is not meaningful to the audience.

Determining what is meaningful to your audience is an important aspect of preparing good persuasive speeches. You can use an audience analysis to learn about your audience.

Determine your audience's age, gender, cultural background, educational level, level of interest in your topic and, for a persuasive speech, their current position regarding the topic you are attempting to persuade them about.

An example of how this helps you in terms of providing reasons that are meaningful to your audience is that if you were giving a speech about good dental hygiene to preschoolers, saying that brushing their teeth every day will make their parents happy would be a reason that is relevant to them.

This reason would not be particularly meaningful and effective for college students. For college students perhaps suggesting that good dental hygiene makes them attractive to the opposite sex would be more meaningful!

Knowing your audience's current position on your topic helps you construct good persuasive speeches.

If your audience already agrees with your point of view and you are simply motivating them to take a particular action, your approach can be to reinforce the area of agreement, build enthusiasm for what the results their participation would create and then to provide a very direct call to action.

If your audience is undecided about your point of view, it is important to develop the informational aspect of your persuasive speech giving your audience plenty of background and solid, evidence-based reasons to agree with you.

If you are speaking to an audience that is hostile to your point of view, your primary approach is not to directly attack your audience's current beliefs, but rather, to develop some common ground that can be a starting point for further conversation.

Select an ethical speech goal, provide reasons that are relevant to your purpose and meaningful to your audience, choose an approach based on your audience's current position and you're on your way to giving incredibly good persuasive speeches!

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