Communication Persuasive: The Adoption Curve

Gerard A. Hauser covers a plethora of details on how to create a well-made persuasive argument in his book, an Introduction to Rhetorical Theory; however, he covered three specific essentials that are necessary for persuasion: the components logos, pathos and ethos; purposive discourse and rhetorical competence; identification. I will argue for each constituent, respectively, to prove that persuasion cannot thrive without the aforementioned essentials.

A text can inform, entertain, express, or persuade, and also have different points of view. Each uses different techniques. The best way to understand how persuasive techniques can be used to convey a point of view is by reading examples of persuasive writing. The newspaper, particularly in the editorials and opinion pages, is full of examples. This will not only help you keep up with current events, it will also help you develop the language skills necessary to do persuasive writing yourself.

In addition to the Director of Admissions, I would invite Edna Pontellier, protagonist of Kate Chopin’s novel “The Awakening,” Henry David Thoreau for his work “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” in “Walden,” and Sally K. Ride. I would invite these people because I think they’d all have profound, original thoughts to offer in conversation, and I think it’d be especially interesting because they would probably have conflicting ideas.

The new advances in technology allow businesses to reach different customer bases. This includes buying and selling products over the Internet. The online shopping process is considered e-commerce. E-commerce is made up of different behaviors but for the purpose of this discussion the three discussed are consumer-to-consumer (C2C), business-to-business (B2B), and consumer-to-business (C2B). The different behaviors have different mediums to reach their targeted audience. The message for each behavior persuades a particular audience to purchase a product using that particular medium. Consumers and businesses look to the web for cost-effective ways to sell and buy products.

“I now walk into the wild” stated Chris McCandless, as he is about to make the worst decision of his life. Chris was just your average rich suburban kid when one day he decided to flip his whole world around, Chris decided to leave his whole life behind and to go live off the land in Alaska. Chris tried to do the impossible, and failed terribly. For all i know the only people living off the land are tribes and people in third world countries, these people would switch lives with chris in a heartbeat! Chris never realized how lucky he was to have an education (not just your average education either, he attended Emory), a home, and people that love him. In my eyes chris killed himself with his stupidity. He lacked knowledge of the wilderness, and he never got to prove his point. Although he followed his dream, he died which proves that you cannot live your life off of the land. Chris was a fool because he was not prepared to go into the wild and because he hurt a lot of people emotionally while gone.

Tone is a very important part in writing essays, letters, articles, and even ads. There are many different tones you can use in your writing. If you are writing an argumentative writing then tone can either strengthen or weaken your argument. For example these two sixth graders named Dave Kessler and Janet Chen, wrote argumentative letters to their schools editor about ads in their schools.

The persuasive speech I viewed was titled “Implications of Social Networking and Text messaging”, which I immediately was drawn to which looking for a video on YouTube. It caught my attention because I use social networking and texting every day as a form of communication and wanted to know what was so detrimental to doing so. During the entirety of the speech, the speaker stayed true to the title. He talked about the negative outcomes of using too much social networking and texting but made sure to be credible with facts, and fun statistics throughout.

Through her sarcastic and contemptuous tone in Persuasion, Austen portrays how many members of the upper class only cared about appearance and thought of themselves as being more attractive and overall better than everyone else. After Mr. Elliot had come to Bath and spent time with the Elliots, they could not stop talking about him. Sir Walter, while discussing the flaws in his appearance, said that “‘He did not mean to complain, however. Mr. Elliot was better to look at than most men, and he had no objection to being seen with him any where’” (Austen 93). Despite having spent a large chunk of time doing nothing but “complain[ing]” about Mr. Elliot’s appearance, Austen mockingly states that criticizing him was not his intent. Sir Walter actually thinks of Mr. Elliot as “better

Effective communication is important for any relationship and is a key area for developing relationships with others. It enables us to get a better understanding and to connect with the people around us, and allow us to build respect and trust, resolve differences and solve problems. It is also the ideal environment where our ideas and sharing our care and affection can flourish.

In the Ted Talk “We should aim for perfection- and stop fearing failure”, Jon Bowers outlines his argument for perfection. He begins by giving an example of a “small error” that ended up costing Amazon over $160 million dollars. He then lists more examples draws them forward to present his idea of perfection. The examples show how one tiny error can have an enormous impact and he turns to the audience asking “why we cannot achieve perfection?”. He draws the listeners in by giving personal experience in striving for perfection. “Look, a hundred people die everyday due to vehicular crashes. Think about that for a second. That's like the equivalent of four commercial airliners crashing every week, yet we still can't convince ourselves to pay perfect attention behind the wheel. So I teach my drivers to value perfection”. Jon is an educator for professional delivery drivers and has to ensure that they are prepared to handle any and every situation possible.

In the featured article “The Science of Persuasion”, the author, Robert Cialdini talks about how to get someone to listen to you and do what you want them to do. Persuasion is the ability or power to get someone to do something that you want them to do by backing up their argument with logical facts and ideas. According to the article, there are 6 ways into initiating a response from an individual: Reciprocity, Consistency, Social Validation, Liking, Authority, and Scarcity. When we reciprocate to something, we are somehow influenced or inclined to return what we have received from others or in other words, doing a favor in return for a favor. Reciprocity is MORE than just presents and gifts. It is about the concessions that

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In writing it’s important to have an understanding of what you’re trying to convey for your audience in addition to how you you will present your ideas. Effective communication extends beyond having well organized writing expressed in complete and coherent sentences. The style, tone and clarity of writing must also be considered, as they are constantly changing relative to the audience. Again, analyzing one’s audience and purpose is essential to successful writing. Appropriately, when choosing the most effective language, it is important to consider the document objective as well as the reader. In essence, this idea of effective use of language has been the overarching theme of this online English course. Each writing assignment

Attitudes refer to one’s evaluations of the social world: others, objects and ideas. These overall evaluations can be positive, negative, or neutral, vary in their extremity and be based on a variety of information (Tesser and Martin, 1996; Petty, Wheeler, and Tormala, 2003 ). A popular conceptualization of the attitude construct, the tripartite theory, holds that there are three primary types of information in which attitudes can be based (Breckler, 1984; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960; Zanna & Rempel, 1988) : cognitions or beliefs, affect or feelings and actions or behaviour. As defined by Richard Perloff, persuasion is the process which moulds and shapes attitudes. It is through persuasion that changes in attitudes can occur. The two methods

Persuasion is described as the deliberate process that intends to change an individual’s attitudes, behaviours or beliefs from their previous initial views and ways of behaving in society. Persuasive communication is widespread and evident all around us, including in central areas of politics, marketing and media. Burkholder et al’s (2003) findings support the idea that there are cultural differences evident in the effectiveness of persuasion, in which they found that shortly after the end of the Iraq war, surveys indicated that although Americans favoured the use of military action against Iraq by 2:1, Europeans opposed it by the same margin. There are four key factors that help influence persuasion amongst the masses, depending on their