Persuasive Communication in Personnel, Professional, and Academic Contexts

CM-220 – Unit 2 Assignment

Persuasive Communication in Personnel, Professional, and Academic Contexts

Persuasive communication is an important component to gaining momentum in a tactful way. Success in your personal life, professional life, or academic career can involve the need for a persuasive piece compiled of research and facts to back your opinion and help sway your readers opinion. Persuasive writing allows you the ability to formulate specific reasons for your opinions and provides an opportunity to research facts related to your opinions. Although persuasive writing in any context should follow the same necessary components to be effective, the audience you are trying to reach will formulate the need for your writing technique to change some. This could affect the tone of your writing, the type of research needed to back your opinion, he delivery of the writing, and the way you chose to gage the readers interest all together.

Persuasive communication in a personal context

Persuasive communication in a personal context the least formal of the three areas I mentioned earlier. There are many different reasons a persuasive communication may need to occur in your personal life, but for the purpose of this paper I will provide you with an example from my own experience. My son Gary was a brilliant little boy with a very strong personality. Although he made good grades, he struggled to meet the classroom requirements for rules and procedures to keep the learning environment well structured; as a result, he was often in detention. As his mother, I new there were some things Gary could not control because he suffered from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. To help Gary be more successful in his classroom and to provide his teachers with a solution to his disturbance, I had to construct a persuasive letter to the school board and child study team convincing them that Gary was not just misbehaved, but that he needed more out of the day to satisfy the needs his disorder presented him with. The school board and child study team, all well versed in common adolescent disabilities, such as ADHD, did not need a thoroughly researched paper on ADHD, they instead needed to be convinced that intervention was the solution not detention. My intent to grab the attention of the readers was simple. Use statistics from the city in which we reside on the pass and fail rates of classified students; we all know the school gains funding with higher pass rates, and when money is the bottom line, almost everyone is attentive. The tone of this letter was the most important component. I did not want to come across as a desperate mother pleading for help for my child. Instead, I wanted to present as a well-educated individual on the subject and present to the boards how one child struggling can affect an entire classrooms standardized test scores and how their interventional capabilities would benefit the class. A great about of research went into this persuasive letter, as child study team classifications are often disregarded in my school district. I spent a great deal of time learning my rights as a mother, Gary’s rights as a child with disabilities, and the school’s role in providing services and receiving funding for them. This letters content was well researched, well organized, and backed with undoubtable fact available from the state of New Jersey School Board websites. My tone very directly focused on the schools need to provide a service to benefit themselves, not just my son. I sent this letter by way of certified mail with returned receipt so that I was able to track its arrival and follow up time and ensured the signature line included the names of all copied recipients. Not all personal persuasive writings will have the need to be this formal, however these circumstances certainly called for it.

Persuasive communication in a professional context

Persuasive communication in a professional context follows a need to be a lot less diplomatic, a little bit more tactful by way of appreciation, and allows for a slightly less formal approach. A few months back I was taking notice to a great deal of tension within my department at work. It is an office filled of women which can be a difficult atmosphere, and my boss, the only male. Our genetic structure in the workplace was difficult for my boss to handle as the only male, and my perception of the situation was that he often ignored worrisome behavior among the team instead of addressing the turmoil. It was becoming a hostile work environment and I needed to talk to my boss about it. I composed an email to my boss trying to persuade him that these behaviors were not typical of women, therefore ignorable, that the tension in the office was effecting productivity, and that it was necessary for him to step in and ty to put a stop to the inappropriate behaviors. This type of persuasive writing did not require hard fact research to back what I was presenting, instead it required factual encounters that were unproductive, situational experiences that created discontent, and my tone to be passionate, but not so vested in the situation that I seemed incapable of continuing in my role. I used a motivational quote to gain the attention of my boss in this email, as I know in our office, we have a vision of exceeding expectation. I did not name anyone in my email to ensure I avoided my email being misrepresented as a venting opportunity. As in any professional setting, productivity and efficiency is of the upmost importance, therefore I used this as a flatform to base my concerns. I allowed the voice in this email to show how passionate I was about my role within the organization but was careful not to make statements that would represent a personal feeling from a negative perspective. I was speaking directly to my boss in the email I sent to him, and was very clear in explaining I felt it best to send him an email as opposed to speaking face to face so that I could be sure to carefully construct my words to ensure he did not feel I was stepping on his toes, but would still very directly represent my opinion and my requesting he take a stand in leadership and help guide my peers on a different path. Although this email exchange for persuasion was in a professional setting, it was most certainly less formal than my correspondence in my personal experience. I was still careful to use facts surrounding the experiences and not just what could be perceived as my perception but did not have to provide hard research on hostile work environment to get my boss to see my side of the situation.

Persuasive communication in an academic context

Persuasive communication in an academic context is the most informal of the three areas I have covered. In an academic setting we are persuading our professors and our peers through our own research and learning capabilities. We want to prove to our peers and professors we have comprehended the material and sway them on different subject matters we are passionate about through expression with our opinion on different areas. This type of persuasive writing requires the most research backed justification, an informal writing objective that is very clearly written and easy to follow. Just this week in my psychology in cognition class I was to post a discussion board on a rare condition know as prosopagnosia. This is a condition in which one can does not recognize faces; even the face of those closest to them. My persuasive opinion in this discussion was to prove that this disorder is more devasting in children than in adults. There is not a whole lot of research on this disorder and it is extremely rare, however it is a disorder in which one is born with it. For children, their cognitive development is not complete, there ability to cope and understand what is wrong with the visual capabilities limited. The inability to recognize the face of their mother and father terrible scary and anxiety and fear a daily emotion. I used peer reviewed research articles to provide hard facts to support how a child suffering this disease is affected daily. In a persuasive discussion such as this it is necessary to leave out emotion, such as, “I think it is really sad that these children suffer anxiety.” It does not fundamentally add to the discussion or help to strengthen the persuasive argument. The tone in these types of persuasive writings should be confident and articulate. Using to many big words can be confusing to the reader and take away from the picture you are trying to paint.

As you can see there are both common and uncommon denominators in all aspects of persuasive writing. When writing to accomplish a personal objective it is important to engage the reader and ensure they are vested in what they are reading. Provide hard evidence to support your opinion in a way that relates to the reader. Do not use a tone that will lead to the perception of desperation or make your writing sound as if it is a plea to get your way. When writing in professionally persuasive context, be tactful and careful as to how your word your request. You want to appeal to the reader in a way that sounds your passion through words but does not come off as threatening to anyone involved. Providing factual based information pertaining to the workplace, not necessarily scholarly researched data, will help support how your request will be beneficial to the organization as a whole and not present as a piece based on venting. Lastly, when writing in an academic persuasive context, use scholarly research to support your position. Be confident, but do not overuse big words to try and sound more intelligent, it will only confuse the reader. All three areas of persuasive writing require some type of evidence to support an opinion but require a different tone to speak to the audience, and a different level of relatability to ensure you have gotten the attention needed. The goal in mind is to persuade your audience that your opinion is valid and with good reason, not necessarily change the way they see the world in one read.