Everyone in the world is constantly seeing the concept of persuasion being used around them in many different situations. I've seen persuasion in the classroom, at home, in politics on TV, and within my group of friends. Persuasion is effective most of the time if the source of the information is a reliable and credible one. People will more likely be persuaded about something if they can relate to the source of information and believe that the information is correct. Persuasion differs from person to person and I also think that people are persuaded in different ways.
Persuasion to me is a way of altering ones thoughts or feelings about a certain topic and changing it to the persauders thoughts. In order to persuade ones feelings or thoughts about a topic, the persuader must have confidence, personality and a loud voice. I think that these three elements make a speaker an effective one at that. Having confidence will show the audience that the speaker has strong feelings about something and people sometimes will follow by lead and start to feel the same way after seeing someone speaking so confidently.
When it comes to evidence to support ones thoughts or feelings about a topic, the evidence must be reliable and worthy of peoples time. Some evidence is more compelling to some people maybe because the audience may have never heard of such evidence and their attention is now more focused on the speaker. Building that rapport with the audience will give the speaker much more pride from the audience.
Issues that are immediate and urgent are the ones that are more likely to be paid attention to. I say this because I think that people would be more attentive to something that needs to be solved sooner than later because not fixing whatever the problem may be, may or may not affect that person. Issues that are more objective and broader, are more likely to be on a long-term basis. These broad topics expand over a long time period obviously because they have many more things to be covering and how to fix the problem at hand.
If somebody feels so strongly about a certain topic, their feelings and attitudes about that topic probably will not change just because somebody is trying to persuade them differently. Even if the persuader has good and valid points, the audience members may stick to their personal beliefs most of the time. This is seen most of the time in politics.
In conclusion, I hope to gain a lot out of this course. I am not interested in politics at all and I barely follow any of the political debates or anything like that because, I'm not going to lie, I have zero interest in it. Hopefully over the course of this semester my view on politics will change and I can have a minor background in the field of politics.
