Persuasive Communication

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2010400,00.html#article_continue

With election season fast approaching, examples of persuasive communication are not hard to find. Many presidential candidates have visited Clemson's campus recently, and I went to see two of them speak. One of my roommates and I went to Mike Huckabee's rally when he came to Clemson. The week after that, I went with another one of my roommates to hear Barack Obama speak. Political opinions aside, I was much more impressed with Obama than I was with Huckabee. Obama's eloquence alone made him a much more appealing and persuasive speaker than Huckabee. He immediately connected with his audience because of his strong ethos. He told stories that really helped people feel like they had a connection with him. He made several arguments that boosted his ethos and his ideas just made sense, which appealed to logos. One example that sticks out in my mind is the story he told of how he went to work and live with the people in the slums of Chicago (I think) when he graduated. He came across as a humble and down-to-earth candidate who actually cared about people and not just about pushing his own agenda. Granted, I think it is a general truth that politicians say things to intentionally gain credibility with their audience (ethos), appeal to people's emotions (pathos), and come across as logical and reasonable (logos), but Obama did an excellent job of incorporating these three aspects into his talk. He even alluded to Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, arguably one of the very best examples of persuasive communication in history. King used many of the same tactics in his rhetoric to appeal to emotions and logic and gain credibility with the church officials to whom he was writing. His writing was passionate yet he wisely chose his words to be incredibly effective. We also had guest speakers in class last week who spoke on the art of persuasiveness. They themselves were not as persuasive as I expected them to be, especially since their jobs were to persuade people of the benefits of joining the Army. I did not find them very persuasive at all. They did several of the things they told us not to do, and they did not seem to try very hard to appeal to the ethos, pathos, and logos of their audience (our class). Overall, I was very impressed with both Martin Luther King, Jr.'s letter and Obama's speech but not with the guest speakers we had in class.