topic ideas:Prepping for advocacy speeches starts soon so we need to be thinking about topic ideas now. The policy speech asked you to reach out and attempt to persuade the members of your audience that disagreed with you. Now, you must work on getting those members of your audience that agree with you to take some type of action.

In the advocacy speech you will ask your audience to take actions that contribute to solving a problem you have identified (this could be a problem no one knows about, or a problem everyone knows about but doesn’t do anything to solve – you need to determine what is the necessary amount of information to provide based on your topic and the amount of research it may require). In this speech, you will foster shared beliefs, identify a pressing problem, provide appropriate solutions, and motivate the audience to act. We are not looking for passive agreement, we are looking for action – so your speech must have a call to action / actionable task. Because of this, all of your speeches will have to use either problem-solution or motivated sequence design. This speech is much more about style and emotion, using words to influence your audience to do something.

For this assignment, you need to post 3 topic ideas for your advocacy speech AND your reason for choosing each topic (1pt). Limit your reason to 100 words or less per topic idea please – no sources, just why you are passionate about that topic. You must also respond to at least 2 people (0.5 pts each), giving them feedback on their ideas (do you agree/disagree, have you ever heard of it before, have you ever taken action about this problem before, etc.).

audience analysis:A clear, direct link to your audience will enable you to more carefully determine your speech goals, design your appeals, select your examples, etc. This information can dramatically increase your powers of persuasion and should be interwoven into your presentation (meaning you should use the audience analysis information in your speech, if appropriate).

Information Gathering: You should spend some time analyzing your audience to figure out what your audience already knows about your topic and if they already have opinions about your topic (you can use the topic briefing discussion board, the PS audience analysis discussion board, post a survey, email them all, create a doodle poll, or message them directly). You could even read through prior posts on other assignments or watch earlier speeches to try to gain some insight into how your audience thinks/feels about your topic already. Remember this class is your audience so these are the people whose opinions matter – asking your friends or family members will not be as helpful as finding out what you can about this particular audience. One purpose for most of the prior work in this class has been to give you a way to gain information about your audience’s knowledge, interests and attitudestoward your persuasive goal.

Assignment: For this assignment, thoroughly summarize how you conducted your audience analysis and the results. Specifically discuss how the information you gathered affected your speech (or if it did not affect your speech, why not?). This summary should be 1-2 well-developed paragraphs that indicate you put some thought and effort into adapting your message to this particular audience.