For many the first time they bake a cake it will end up being a burnt offering to their friends or family. Baking a cake is a skill. So is making a speech. A cake's taste is largely determined by the ingredients that are mixed into it. The effectiveness of a speech will be very dependent on the materials the speaker puts into it.
The material used in persuasive speech should stimulate one or more of the following natural elements of persuasion;
1. Attention
2. Interest
3. Conviction
4. Desire
5.Action
The list of "ingredients" needed to make your speech more persuasive are:
1. Satisfy yourself that you know your cause fully and wholeheartedly believe in it.
2. Start your speech with a human interest story, thought-provoking question, a bit of humor, suspense, a novel or unusual visual aid to get immediate attention.
3. Make the purpose of your talk clear, but use very little time to accomplish that. Avoid making it long and dull. The important job is to move forward and do what the speaker has said they will.
4. Inform your listeners how the speech will help them or why they will be interested in it.
5. The material presented must be logical and contain plenty of commonsense. No amount of persuasion will be accepted by people that will make them appear foolish.
6. Use quotations. The most effective quotations to use in a speech are those made by people recognized as experts in their field e.g. Einstein on science, Mayo brothers on surgery.
7. Make illustrations be the core of your speech. Jesus' talks were full of stories. Abraham Lincoln was also famous for his stories.
8. Clear interesting facts are necessary, especially for the conviction step. Facts add weight to a talk. However, facts can be dull, they do not create vivid picture or touch the listeners' emotions. Try to package the facts in ways that will make them easy for the audience to understand. So instead of saying "The death rate in China is high," try something like "Every time you breathe a Chinese person dies."
9. To stimulate desire make a vivid appeal to the senses cast in frames of the audience's wants or desires. Of course the appeal must be believable. The most effective persuasion is by a combination of stimulating a listener's wants and influencing their mind.
10. After gaining the attention and interest, convinced the listeners and stimulated desire, the speaker only has to close by showing his audience what to do. Make it easy for them. People will fail to act if the speaker does not make it easy for them to do so.
The materials outlined will add spice to your speech and will also make it more effective. Persuasive public speaking, like good baking, requires that you practice and include the materials that are needed to deliver an effective speech.
