You're crafting a persuasive speech. How can logical reasoning enhance your message?

Using logical reasoning helps you establish trust with your audience. When your points follow a clear, rational progression, you show that your message is not just based on emotions or opinions but on sound analysis and facts. It enables you to connect the dots for your listeners, guiding them step-by-step toward your conclusion. A logical foundation allows you to persuade and engage critical thinkers who need more than emotional appeals to be convinced.

To craft a compelling conclusion, it’s essential to present evidence in a logical, sequential flow that builds upon itself. This initial evidence should naturally lead you to the next piece, creating a cohesive narrative that guides the audience through your reasoning. Each subsequent piece of evidence should reinforce and expand upon the previous one, demonstrating how they collectively support your conclusion. While your experimental process might have revealed these insights in a different order, restructuring the evidence for your talk enhances clarity and impact, making the overall presentation more persuasive and easier to follow.

Mind needs to make sense and have coherence to move towards something . So taking your audience step by step through a logical argument is not only respectful, interesting and sincere, but also allows them to welcome a message without resistance.

First, you must understand your audience. You need to start from what they think or know and then take them on a journey of understanding.

A lot of my students think that emphasizing evidence and argument in a speech means they're somehow kickstarting everybody's smart brain, and the more complicated they make it, the more their audience will be impressed. Actually, the more familiar and digestible and accessible you make your appeals, the more likely an audience is to think hard about them and respond favorably if they're well-constructed. Hypothetical examples with everyday objects or widely shared experiences can be the best way to strengthen the effectiveness of an argument-heavy speech. Plus, if you do happen upon something they have, or experience, then that makes it easier for them to remember your appeal. The more abstract it is, the more quickly they'll forget it.

Audience members who don't regard your topic as high priority, or who are distracted by other concerns, are a lot more likely to respond to appeals based on belonging, gratitude, familiarity, or other sensations. But if you have an audience whose professional profile suggests that they love to think things out -- research scientists, federal judges, that type -- then load up your best evidence tied together by your most careful reasoning and let them enjoy themselves as they rack their brains. Last, anyone who thinks that it's possible for logic or emotion to come out of a human brain all by itself, without the other, needs to get out of the nineteen hundreds, and a good place to start is "Descartes' Error" by António Damásio.