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Alright, so...here at Clover Park,
Speech #4 is the one and only persuasive speech
that you're gonna be doing.
At other colleges, usually...
especially in community colleges,
where they're trying to help people transfer
to four-year institutions where they might actually major
in communications as a field of study,
they were going to great lengths--great detail--
on persuasive speech.
They would talk about the history of persuasion,
starting with Aristotle.
And then, they would talk
about great persuasive speakers of the past.
They would talk about rhetoric.
Then would talk about critical thinking.
They would talk about logic and reasoning,
and syllogisms, and drawing inferences,
inductive and deductive logic.
All these kinds of things.
They might even give you an exact paradigm.
An exact form to follow in a persuasive speech,
such as Monroe's Motivated Sequence.
This might take five or six weeks.
At Highline Community College, for instance,
they go through a very rigorous process
in which students go online, prepare an outline.
They comment on each other's outlines.
They revise them, and then finally,
at the very culmination of all this,
after four weeks or so,
they actually give their persuasive speeches.
The topics that they use in many other colleges
would not have too much to do, necessarily,
with your own lives.
They would be things like political topics,
social issues, international things,
things in which lots of people in our society might differ
and which are argumentative.
They would require you to have, perhaps,
10 or 12 different citations in reading in order to do that.
But...this is a technical college
in which none of you, I suppose,
is gonna go on to major in communication
at Washington State University, or the University of Washington,
or some other place.
So my perspective has been in the past eight years
that instead of giving you
that kind of traditional persuasive speech task,
I want you to have the opportunity
to practice something that is persuasive
that relates directly to your lives,
which is finding a job.
That's why we have the "Why You Should Hire Me" speech.
It's not as long as your others, because in a real job setting,
you probably wouldn't be given a lot of time
to make your case by yourself.
But as you know, in this class, each of you--
if we have four speakers-- will speak for 3 to 5 minutes,
saying why you should be hired.
After that, those four of you will be seated over here.
The rubric writers will assume the role
of simulated job interviewers,
and we'll have a panel interview.
That part will not be graded, but we'll all have a chance
to talk about what we thought of the person's answers.
We'll probably be a little bit more rigorous--
I don't want to say harsh--
but a little bit more incisive in our reactions there
than we would be in most of the speeches,
because after all, the purpose of this
is to prepare you, through a challenge,
for the challenges you're gonna have
when you are in the job market.
What questions do you have about the format?
Okay...Brian, why don't you go ahead
and turn that off for a second.