Introduction to persuasion

What is persuasion?

Persuasion is an attempt to convince someone that your opinion about a topic is correct.

In a persuasive essay or presentation you will use:

• logic
• appeal to the emotions of your audience
• and show that you know what you are talking about

In this article you will discover two ways to give a persuasive speech.

The first is to make a convincing argument.The method presented here is based on on the work of Stephen Toulmin. It has 5 steps: claim, evidence, support for evidence, counter claim and rebuttal.

The second are techniques used to move an audience emotionally. We call this rhetoric.

Let’s start with the Toulmin method