The previous chapter introduced persuasion as the strategic use of verbal and nonverbal symbols to influence the beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action of an audience. In that chapter, we established persuasion’s importance for civic engagement and identified six steps you should take when developing a persuasive speech. We then explored the first three steps: (1) consider audience analysis and adaptation, (2) select a persuasive goal, and (3) empower your audience to act. Basically, we suggested you start by knowing your audience and then, using that information, determine what you want them to think, believe, or do and give them the means to carry that out.

This chapter picks up with the next (and last) three steps to prepare your speech: (4) invent the content of your speech, (5) frame your persuasive efforts, and (6) refute counterarguments. Together, these steps will help you develop the speech content that fulfills your speech goal. We will explore each step, beginning with invention and then turning to framing and refutation in turn.

Invention: The Substance of Persuasion

Invention, as you learned in chapter 1, is the process of investigation and thought that produces the content of your speech. This designation originated in rhetoric’s ancient past, but we still use the term. It emphasizes that when we speak, we make up or “invent” arguments intended to persuade. Of course, when done properly—and ethically—your words and arguments will be based on thorough research and credible sources that you credit through citations as described in chapters 8 and 9. Ultimately, though, you come up with what you say in your speech.

How do you stimulate your thinking? How do you overcome writer’s block to construct your speech? This is precisely what the canon of invention is designed for. We will begin by considering how you can use available strategies, or heuristics, of invention to develop ideas. Second, we will guide you through central proofs or means of invention you can adopt to develop the substance of your persuasion.

Heuristics

Imagine a legal pad or computer file with pages of information and evidence you collected from your research. What can you do with all this information? Thinkers and speakers in the past turned to heuristics: specific strategies for generating new ideas.

Heuristic devices stimulate your intellectual discovery as you think through your topic, formulate arguments, and structure your speech. Box 25.2 contains a selection of the most commonly used strategies of rhetorical invention, or heuristics.

How do heuristic devices work in developing a speech? In many ways, they are comparable to the stunningly successful—and always enjoyable—original Play-Doh Fun Factory. The device took a blob of Play-Doh and turned it into a spaghetti-type noodle, a star, or a lightning bolt. Somewhat like when using cookie cutters, there were perhaps twenty or thirty different shapes you could mold the Play-Doh into.

Heuristic devices make use of your research in much the same way; they show you various ways to shape that information and those ideas for your audience into a thesis statement, supporting arguments, or even organizational structures (like those discussed in chapter 13). The best thing to do is to try several, see what they generate, and then select from your creations, taking into account your audience, goals, and context.

Modes of Proof: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos

Another aspect of invention, also formally presented by Aristotle, includes three artistic modes of proof: ethos, pathos, and logos. By modes of proof, Aristotle simply meant the ways people are persuaded or what they find persuasive. In differentiating the modes, Aristotle explained that

• ethos is found “in the character of the speaker,”
• pathos relies on “disposing the hearer a certain way,” and
• logos depends on “the thing itself which is said, by reason of its proving, or appearing to prove, the point.”^[2]

In each case, the proof is the persuasive appeal you share with your audience. Depending on the goal, audience, subject matter, and occasion, you will vary the proof you use.

Whatever your specific persuasive speaking goal, you should employ all three aspects of invention—namely, logos, ethos, and pathos—to accomplish it. In the previous chapter, we explained that your specific persuasive goal will be to change your audience’s beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action. Some students mistakenly think speeches that target beliefs rely solely on logos while speeches that try to change attitudes only utilize pathos and so on. Such thinking confuses the end goal with the means used to achieve it (i.e., tools of invention). Whatever your end goal is, you can and should make use of all three available modes of proof. Let’s turn briefly to each next.

Logos

Sound persuasion is based on evidence and valid reasoning. In Aristotle’s words, this is the work of logos. Logos is the logical or reasoned basis of an appeal. Thus, for our purposes, logos refers to the argumentative substance of the presentation. Argumentation constitutes a type of proof to convince audiences to accept your message. Because this aspect of public presentations is fundamental, we have made it the focus of the next two chapters. However, argumentation is only one mode of proof.

Ethos

Persuasion is also a matter of credibility or ethos. As described in chapter 5, ethos is drawn from the audience’s perception of the speaker’s credibility. When an audience perceives you as credible, or “worthy of confidence,” they are more likely to be persuaded by you. In other words, your credibility functions as another form of proof of the validity of your argument.

Notice, however, that your ethos exists only to the degree that your audience perceives you as credible, and their perception is based on how you present yourself in and through your speech. You may have established a public reputation that precedes your speech, but you must further develop, reinforce, and/or improve your ethos in and through each presentation you make.

According to Aristotle, speakers can develop their ethos by demonstrating one or more of the following four qualities through their speech:

• competence (expertise, preparation, intelligence)
• trustworthiness (moral standing, integrity)
• goodwill (having an audience’s best interests at heart)
• dynamism (charisma)^[3]

We are persuaded by advocates and sources that best display these qualities. Consequently, Priyanka, for example, might stress her experience as a lifelong athlete and member of the basketball team (competence) as well as her desire for all student athletes at her college to be treated fairly (goodwill).

It’s important you spend time cultivating your ethos because, according to Aristotle, moral character (ethos) offers the most effective means of persuasion.^[4] You might consider why and whether you agree with him.

Pathos

Finally, there is the role of emotion or pathos. Recall from chapter 5 that pathos is concerned with the psychological state of the audience and rests upon effective, ethical appeals to their emotions and motivations. Practically speaking, pathos is a measure and reflection of the extent to which we are moved by and feel invested in a topic and a message. Those feelings constitute another form of proof of the validity of the speaker’s case.

Feelings may be appealed to or cultivated in a multitude of ways. Aristotle makes the intuitive argument that we desire emotions that result in pleasure and want to avoid emotions that result in pain. A speaker can use this observation when crafting their message:

• Perhaps they associate the problem they are targeting with painful emotions. Aristotle listed such painful feelings as anger, fear, shame, shamelessness, contempt, pity, indignation, and envy.
• A speaker can elicit pleasurable feelings in relation to their desired solution. Aristotle named such pleasurable feelings as patience, friendship, confidence, and kindness.

Of course, these are only a sampling of possible emotions you can elicit and ways you can use them in your speech.

Box 25.4 Pathos in Practice

The effective use of pathos can be seen in Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Muffet McGraw’s April 4, 2019, response to a reporter’s question.^[5] The question was prompted by an interview published earlier in which McGraw critiqued the prominence of men hired as coaches in women’s sports, especially college basketball, and defended her own all-female coaching staff.^[6] On this occasion, the reporter asked her, “How seriously do you take being that voice,” referring to being a voice for women.

McGraw answered by eliciting indignation about the current inequity. She explained, “We’ve had a record number of women running for office and winning and, still, we have 23% of the House and 25% of the Senate. I’m getting tired of the novelty of the first female governor of this state; the first female African American mayor of this city. When is it going to become the norm instead of the exception?”

She then expressed anger and shame about the state of things: “Girls are socialized to know when they come out, gender roles are already set. Men run the world. Men have the power. Men make the decisions. It’s always the men.” Moving from broader society to sports, McGraw offered hope that athletics could help improve conditions for women: “When these girls are coming out, who are they looking up to tell them that that’s not the way it has to be? And where better to do that than in sports?…Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach them to watch how women lead? This is a path for you to take to get to the point where in this country we have 50% of women in power.”

Her use of hopefulness was then joined by confidence in her practice of hiring women and a return to anger about the problem. McGraw’s response exemplifies the range of emotional appeals available to a rhetor when advocating for a policy change and, especially, the effective association of painful emotions with the status quo.

Clearly, appeals to pathos are potentially very powerful. Consequently, it is this dimension of rhetoric—emotional appeal—that has caused some scholars to distrust rhetoric. The concern is that rhetoric can obstruct good decision-making by displacing reason with emotion. We have certainly seen examples of speakers who rely excessively on emotional appeals and frequently on the emotion of fear. For instance, we see scare tactics in accusations of immigrants overrunning our borders and committing crimes or claims that our legal system is persecuting innocent officials and turning a blind eye to guilty leaders. Although emotion can be overused, it is a valuable part of deliberation and a corrective to an idealized, coldly rational perspective.

Because invention regards the core appeals and content of your speech, its methods and results should inform the next several steps in the persuasive process. In other words, use heuristics and modes of proof to help you frame your persuasive efforts and refute counterarguments.

Framing Persuasive Efforts

Recall from chapter 21 that framing is the process by which people use language to present and make sense of their world. We identified three parts to any framing of a civic issue. Every frame identifies or defines

• the problem (i.e., what’s wrong),
• its cause (i.e., who’s to blame), and
• the solution (i.e., what should be done).

We also discussed how to use deliberative framing to set up a deliberative presentation. We concluded that since such presentations are educational, a speaker must frame the problem and possible solutions as clearly and fairly as possible.

You will now be involved with advocacy, however, whereby you will try to influence your direct audience’s beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action. Therefore, you should employ persuasive framing in your speech. As we explained in chapter 21, persuasive framing occurs when a speaker strategically names or defines a problem (and its cause) in a way that sets up their desired solution as effective and reasonable. Indeed, you will need to frame the civic issue you are addressing as worthy of the audience’s attention and your solution as a reasonable and superior response to the problem.

Demonstrate the Issue as Worthy of Attention

Unless you can convince your audience of the issue’s seriousness, they won’t have reason to change their beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action. You can demonstrate seriousness in a few ways: Characterize the problem as a violation of the audience’s shared values, narrow your focus, offer compelling evidence of the issue’s existence, and illustrate how the problem affects your audience’s lives.

Violation of Values

First, it is often effective to depict the problem as a violation of the audience’s shared values or commitments. In chapter 21, we defined a value as a principle or quality that human beings are committed to and upon which they base their thinking and decisions for important issues. You can employ the power of values in persuasion by explaining how the problem is violating your audience’s values and commitments. This strategy is effective whether your specific goal is to influence the audience’s beliefs, attitudes, or courses of action.

Box 25.5 Framing the Issue as a Violation of Values: Sample Argument

A good example of persuasive framing can be found in the rhetoric we considered earlier by McGraw. Recall she had said earlier that as head coach for Notre Dame’s women’s basketball team, she only hired female coaches. That statement stirred controversy, resulting in her being asked more about her policy.

When prompted by a reporter, McGraw could have presented her argument in terms of its effectiveness (her team was headed to the Final Four) or the disproportionate amount of male staff in college sports.

Instead, she framed her case in light of national gender inequity. She opened by referring to the US government’s failure to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). As she reminded the audience, the ERA was introduced in 1967 to make sex discrimination unconstitutional, but it failed to gain sufficient state support to pass.

She then turned to congressional and local leadership by noting how few women are in the House of Representatives or Senate or are even governors or mayors. At that point she asked, “How are these young women looking up and seeing someone that looks like them, preparing them for the future? We don’t have enough female role models. We don’t have enough visible women leaders. We don’t have enough women in power.”

McGraw established the problem as a vast breach in fairness and gender equity nationally and locally. By establishing the disparity in female leadership as a national and enduring violation of shared values, McGraw’s practice of hiring female staff for women’s sports teams seemed both reasonable and practical—a small place to start, so to speak. Notice, too, that framing her hiring practice as helping alleviate the problem depicted McGraw as a kind of innovative problem-solver and encouraged the audience to identify with her desire for equality and fairness.

Narrow Focus

Second, narrow your focus so your audience perceives themselves as capable of making a change. Avoid making an issue seem so immense or difficult that you give the impression that nothing can be done. For instance, it would be a tall order to convince your audience in ten minutes that all women’s sports should be funded equally to men’s sports. It would be more realistic to whittle the problem of gender inequity in sports down to a topic like pressures on girls to quit sports in larger numbers than boys or on the relative lack of media attention to women’s sports compared to men’s.

Compelling Evidence

Third, further demonstrate the issue as worthy of your audience’s attention by offering high-quality, tangible evidence of the problem or community concern, whether that be through a reliance on

• logos, which demonstrates the scope of a problem through statistics;
• pathos, which appeals to the emotional and human toll of an issue and highlights specific examples; or
• ethos, which is generated when a subject is explained through credible sources and testimony.

Ideally, a combination of all three types of appeals and evidence forms the strongest presentation.

Direct Effects

Finally, relate the issue directly to your audience by showing how and where it is evident in their lives and communities. Such an approach will not only create audience understanding but also heighten audience identification with the issue.

Emphasize the Superiority of Your Response

Another element of framing is to present a good way to respond to the problem. It isn’t enough to demonstrate that the issue is worthy of the audience’s attention. You must persuade them of the change in belief, attitude, or course of action you want them to adopt in response. Here you clearly restate your thesis and emphasize the superiority of this response to the issue.

Spend time explaining how the desired belief, attitude, or course of action would address the problem. What will it improve, solve, or help? How might recognizing the reality of internet addiction enable sufferers to get help? How would eating locally grown produce improve the city’s economy and possibly the health of its residents?

As you explain, support your explanation of how the desired outcome will improve the problem with evidence derived from examples, statistics, and testimony. Don’t make the audience take your word for it. Use the research methods we discussed in chapters 8 and 9 and employ the argumentation skills we will provide in chapters 26 and 27 to strengthen your case.

Also, ensure that the solution aligns logically with your presentation of the problem. Somewhat like the relationship between a question and an answer, you must frame the issue so that the problem (and its cause) sets up your solution as effective and reasonable.

The Ethics of Framing

You might read our instructions to persuasively frame your topic and wonder, Is this ethical? Is it morally acceptable to strategically present a topic so the audience is more likely to accept my solution? Let’s address these important concerns.

Framing as Necessary and Helpful

On one hand, framing is ethical, because it is necessary and helpful for audiences. Frames help people absorb and make sense of facts and information. A more typical use of the word “framing” may clarify this point.

• Think of the wood frame constructed to build a house. That frame is built directly on top of the foundation, and it creates the solid structure upon which the rest of the housing materials (drywall, roofing tiles, window panes, etc.) hang.
• Similarly, persuasive frames form the basis or context on which we hang or make sense of information. Facts and statistics alone are meaningless to us without a frame or context to give them significance, somewhat like drywall is useless without a wood frame on which to hang it.

In other words, framing in and of itself is not unethical; it is simply the way our minds and human language work. By thoughtfully framing public issues, speakers enable community members to make sense of otherwise meaningless facts or to make order out of seemingly incoherent information.

Box 25.6 Using Framing to Help Your Audience Make Sense of Information

If you tell your audience that US Customs and Border Protection had 2.47 million encounters with people illegally crossing the southwest border in fiscal year 2023, they probably wouldn’t know what to conclude from that statistic. If, instead, you frame these crossings as illustrating a “border crisis” and explain that the number is 40% higher than fiscal year 2021—as the US House Committee on Homeland Security did^[7]—that would invite the audience to conclude that illegal immigration is a problem and that border policies are inadequately addressing it.

Of course, you can prompt a different conclusion with the same statistic if you frame the crossings differently. Bloomberg opinion analyst Jeff Fox, for instance, argued the number is actually evidence of more successful border measures that catch most people crossing or prompt migrants to turn themselves in (to apply for asylum), unlike previous years.^[8] If you framed the statistic accordingly, the audience would be encouraged to view illegal immigration as an issue that is being successfully addressed by border policies at the time.

Honest Versus Dishonest Framing Efforts

On the other hand, we can borrow Will Friedman’s work to distinguish honest from dishonest ways of “framing to persuade.” Friedman defines honest framing efforts as “sincere rhetorical advocacy” in which the speaker says, “‘I believe this because’ and…means it.” Such framing efforts attempt to persuade the audience in an ethical, open, and trustworthy manner with the public good in mind.

In contrast, dishonest framing efforts manipulate facts and promote disinformation. Motivated almost solely by a desire to win the argument by any means necessary, dishonest persuasive framing prioritizes personal gain over the public good.

We have all seen, for example, how attack ads during an election season can take the statements of an opponent (an implied audience or person represented in a speech) out of context, feature unflattering pictures, and publicize rumor as if it’s truth. Such framing harms public debate and fosters the vices of unproductive public discourse discussed in chapter 2.^[9]

We invite and strongly encourage you, then, to advocate a position as skillfully and passionately as possible. Use persuasive framing strategically to make your solution look attractive but do so with honesty and integrity for the benefit of the public good. Maintain such ethical standards as you identify and rebut arguments opposed to your thesis.

Refute Counterarguments

By its very nature, a persuasive presentation will encounter resistance. You are attempting to persuade people to think or act in a way that is counter to what they are presently doing. Listeners generally have reasons they disagree with your perspective—some good, some bad.

To persuade an audience to change its mind, you must address their reasons. If you ignore common counterarguments, or claims and reasoning that oppose your own, the audience is more apt to ignore you. They will feel like you haven’t challenged their perspective and may think you are uninformed about the topic. As a result, an important component of nearly every persuasive speech is attention to counterarguments.

One option available is to explicitly acknowledge a counterargument by stating it and then refuting it—that is, giving the reasons why you think it is invalid or weak. You might even devote a main point of your speech to refuting one or more counterarguments. This occurs when you discuss alternative solutions to a problem, such as in the problem-alternatives-solution or the refutative patterns of organization discussed in chapter 13.

The benefits of acknowledging counterarguments are many: It makes your argument more persuasive to those with opposing views, it shows you are prepared and thoughtful, and it demonstrates you are willing to confront difficult choices.

However, acknowledging counterarguments can backfire if you commit two common mistakes:

1. First, while you have a responsibility to refute counterarguments, don’t feel obliged to make the counterargument. That is, don’t provide evidence that proves the opposing position. Too often this reinforces the opposing view held by those in your audience. This is an additional way persuasion differs from deliberation.
2. Second, avoid adopting the language or phrases used by people who argue against your position. Otherwise, you will unwittingly reinforce the counterargument. For example, if you argue on behalf of undocumented workers but refer to them as “illegal aliens,” it will be difficult for your audience to think of them as anything other than violators of the law who deserve to be punished. Once you adopt the words of a counter perspective, you are arguing at a disadvantage. Instead, find a different language to express the counterargument and your refutation.

Between this and the previous chapter, we have outlined six steps in the process of developing a persuasive speech. While the steps by no means compose a comprehensive template, they do cover the basics of the persuasive process as you move from analyzing your listeners to refuting popular counterarguments.