Persuasive Techniques In Old Majors Speech: Fill & Download for Free

Most literary critics agree that Austen’s best novel is her last one, Persuasion. It is almost a culmination of the skills and tools she develops in writing her preceding novels.Of all the novels’ characters, Persuasion’s are the most complicated and dynamic—the others adhere quite closely to the same general formulas, and one could switch out Marriane for Jane for Elizabeth for Elinor…. Persuasion does follow a formula, with its unlikely heroine and her frigid frenemies and her love interests and her relatively happy ending; but the archetypical characters are altogether more psychologically complicated than those in Austen’s other books because she seems to lose interest in these formulas over time. The formulas, however, sell, and Austen wrote to support herself. She kept the formula, then, but she complicated it. Anne Elliott is not a replaceable character.Persuasion also represents the culmination of Austen’s literary invention, free indirect discourse, in which the author authoritavely tells an audience a character’s thoughts as part of narrative.Example:“She never understood me,” he said. Direct speechHe paced wildly about the room. She never understood him, especially not when it mattered most. Free indirect speechPeople just didn't really do this until Austen. It’s widely believed she invented this technique—if it did appear before her, then she certainly refined it. It surfaces significantly throughout Persuasion; this is Austen’s free indirect tour de force.Spoiler alert (this novel is hundreds of years old, so I am being overly courteous right now): the novel ends with its heroine’s marriage. She does not marry into the aristocracy like other Austenian heroines; she marries into the navy on the eve of the second installment of the Napoleonic War. You might not notice without having a fair amount of historical background in your pocket (or closely reading some annotated versions of the novel), but the specter of war and death haunts the entirety of the novel’s happy ending. Anne and her Captain are together, but really, how long will that last? The question is not, will the Captain be killed; the question is, will they both? This is not a major theme of the novel in any sense; but Austen was not stupid. Making Wentworth a Captain and setting the novel in the exact time she did was intentional.Basically, Austen was a brilliant artist, and Persuasion is often regarded as the most mature and brilliant of all her works.

How did the 12 apostles manage to convince so many people to believe in what they said? What kind of persuasion technique did they use?It is important to realise that we don’t have complete records of apostolic preaching. The records in Paul’s letters and Acts are our sources, and Acts, in particular, while it does report the preaching of Peter, Philip and Paul, shouldn’t be considered to provide verbatim transcripts: as was normal in the classical period, speeches were reported as “the kind of thing said.”However, what we can glean from these sources is still informative.There are two basic preaching situations: event-centred and person centred. For example, on the day of Pentecost, a crowd gathered to see what was happening, and Peter took the opportunity to explain what they were seeing in terms of how he understood it; while, when he was in prison in Philippi, Paul spoke to the gaoler when he was terrified after an earthquake. On the other hand, when Paul and his companions were in Philippi, they specifically sought out a group of Jews and/or God-fearers by the river, and spoke to them there. On other occasions, Paul sought a Synagogue where he could preach and, if he was rejected there, would look for other groups to speak to.We can also notice that the preaching had three key ingredients: an account of the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah, references to the Tanakh (Old Testament) to place these events in the context of God’s plans for humanity, and a personal application — that all humankind is involved in the death of Jesus, but, by repentance and faith, any person can be “delivered from the dominion of darkness and transferred into the Kingdom of God’s beloved Son” to use Paul’s description from Colossians.That is, there were no particularly tricky persuasive techniques. What they did have was absolute conviction, and a clear grasp of the content of their message.There were other factors as well in the growth of Christianity in the ancient world, and these would require a rather large book to fully enumerate. But we can note:Although the majority of Jews didn’t convert a sufficient number did to create a body of people ready to spread the message, and it was among people who knew something very strange had happened relating to the death of Jesus. So the idea of the gospel spread enough to achieve some kind of critical mass — enough for the early church to be self-maintaining.The Pax Romana, and the extensive and relatively well-maintained road system facilitated travel — and travel the early Christians did.It wasn’t just Paul and the other 12 who got about; in fact, when the church was scattered (Acts 8:1), the apostles stayed in Jerusalem, and it was anonymous ordinary Christians who took the message. In fact, Christianity was almost exclusively a lay movement probably until the mid 2nd century. Even the Roman church was anonymously planted and well-established by the time Paul wrote there around 50–56 ADThe first century world was looking for “solutions”: the account of the Magi is consistent with the Zoroastrian expectation of a Messiah-figure to appear at around the time of Jesus’ birth; and in the Greco-roman world, the old gods had lost any allure they had had, while people were open to other religious ideas.The early Christians saw good works as integral to their faith. Unlike the more self-focused eastern religions competing for hearts and minds, Christians sought to care for the needy, including offering medical care and delivering them from demonic oppression (something which disgusted the anti-Christian writer, Celsus!)They didn’t bang their heads against brick walls. Paul’s most unsuccessful evangelistic campaign was in Athens, and he didn’t stay there long.Our major account of the spread of early Christianity is focused on the Middle East, Asia Minor and South-Eastern Europe, however, early Christians established Christianity in many centres, with the apostles often arriving later to confirm what had been started by others (as with Philip in Samaria. The multiple networked centres helped it survive local persecutions.There’s much more which could be said!

The answer has to do more with discipline-based politics than with the fundamental content. In the 1920s, particularly in the United States, the classical field of “rhetoric” — as old as Aristotle and Isocrates (4th Century BCE dudes) began to shift its collegiate instructional focus towards one primary medium of persuasion, the one that had evolved along the lines of the written word. Public speeches were still a thing and were still very popular, amply aided by the advent of radio, and many schools continued to teach classical Rhetoric in all its splendor—the Five Canons; Aristotle’s Ethos, Pathos, Logos; styles of delivery; logical arguments and chains of evidence; elocution and its spin-offs—how to project your voice, speaking stances, facial expressions, stage gestures, etc. These had all been part of what is now called a “classical education.” The earliest public speeches recorded on film amply demonstrate that this approach was still very much in vogue up into the 1940s.In the post WWII United States, with the proliferation of land grant universities and the GI Bill, the “general education core” emerged as universities began to split between undergraduate and graduate studies. The first two years began to focus on fundamental skills, while the “majors” developed as vocational preparation or as introduction to graduate school. “English” emerged as a very popular field of study, but to teach in this discipline as it began to take shape over the 50s and 60s, one had to be willing to pay one’s dues teaching “English composition,” which, for the sake of compression and convenience, began to focus on written persuasion at first, then more and more on basic grammar and essay technique. The latter shift came as secondary schools across the country began to scale back teaching English language skills. Universities had to pick up the slack. So while the second semester course in Composition does get at Rhetorical stuff, a lot of instructional scaffolding that was originally designed to be part of earlier learning is now a regular feature. “Speech” was designed as an entirely different course, taught by people with very different academic preparation. And speech courses were also a seriously reduced version of the old rhetorical training, treating the spoken word very differently from the written word as a result.Rhetoric is still an academic field in its own right, but it has morphed into something very different from Aristotle’s time, and the small numbers of people who study and research it are vastly outnumbered by English Rhet/Comp and people in the Communication social sciences (a spin-off of social psychology), as well as folks in speech pathology.Most “pure rhetoricians” today are humanities scholars (classicists), forensic speech and debate coaches, political discourse analysts (speeches, campaigns and strategic comm) or media critics (media being anything from fine arts to graffiti).