Persuasive Messages

1. In order to gauge the audience's needs while planning a persuasive message, you should ask for specific information about their demographics, psychographics, and their motivation. Also, you should ask what it is you want them to do, how might they resist, are there any alternative positions you need to examine, and what does the audience consider to be the most important issue.

2. Demographics and psychographics help the writer to understand and categorize the audiences needs; they provide information, such as age, gender, personality, income, lifestyle, and attitudes, that can help the writer gear his or her persuasive message to meet the needs of the audience.

3. Emotional appeals are used to call on audience's feelings and make them feel a certain way so they are more likely to accept your message. On the other hand, logical appeals are based on the audience's notion of reason.

4. The three types of reasoning in logical appeals are analogy, induction, and deduction.

5. The AIDA model is a common model of persuasion that mainly uses the indirect approach; it grabs the audiences attention, provides additional details to keep their interest, makes them desire your idea, and calls for a specific action. Its limitations are it is unidirectional meaning it talks at the audience and not with them, and it is built around a single event rather than used for building a long term relationship.