15.3 Use credibility, logical reasoning, and emotional appeals to make your persuasive speech more effective.

Support for your persuasive proposition can include credibility, logic, and emotion. Credibility is your audience’s perception of your competence, trustworthiness, and dynamism. Enhancing your initial credibility before you speak, your derived credibility during your speech, and your terminal credibility after your speech will help you improve your overall credibility as a speaker. Reasoning, the process of drawing a conclusion from evidence, is integral to your persuasive process. The three primary types of reasoning are inductive, deductive, and causal. You can also reason by analogy. You can be a more effective and ethical persuader by avoiding such reasoning fallacies as the causal fallacy, bandwagon fallacy, either–or fallacy, hasty generalization, personal attack, red herring, appeal to misplaced authority, and non sequitur. In addition to persuading others because of who you are (ethos) or how well you reason (logos), you can move an audience to respond by using emotional appeals (pathos).

Organizing Your Persuasive Message