Strategies for Organizing Persuasive Messages 17.5 407
Heather wanted her listeners to visualize the significant negative results
that were likely to occur if the problem of child soldiers went unsolved.
She began with a general statement of what would happen to children if no
action were taken.
The first consequence of child warfare is that these children are left
with serious emotional and psychological scarring due to the violence
and abuse they must endure.
She further painted her negative picture by using a specific emotional exam-
ple in which she described the additional consequences.
Ten-year-old Jacques from the Congo described how the Mayi-Mayi
militia would often starve him and beat him severely. He says, “I
would see others die in front of me.”
Heather also pointed out that if the problem is not addressed soon, it will
grow, and more children will be negatively affected.
Heather only used a negative visualization approach. She could, however,
have made her visualization step even stronger by combining negative and
positive visualization. A combined positive and negative visualization tells
how a problem will be solved if your solution is adopted and describes how
the world will be a much worse place if your solution is not adopted. Heather
might, for example, have added a description that helped her listeners visu-
alize the virtues of taking action, by describing poignant scenes of children
being reunited with their families.
Martin Luther King Jr. drew on visualization as a rhetorical strategy in
his moving “I Have a Dream” speech, presented in Appendix B. He power-
fully and poetically painted a picture with words that continues to provide
hope and inspiration today.- Action. This last step forms the basis of your conclusion. You tell your audi-
ence the specific action they can take to implement your solution. Identify
exactly what you want your listeners to do. Give them simple, clear, easy-
to-follow steps to achieve your goal. For example, you could give them a
phone number to call for more information, provide an address so that they
can write a letter of support, hand them a petition to sign at the end of your
speech, or tell them for whom to vote.
Heather offered specific actions that her listeners could take to address
the problem of children serving as soldiers: “The first step we can take is to
petition the members of the United Nations to enforce the treaties they have
signed, and we can do this by joining the Red Hand Campaign.” She made
her action step simple and easy when she further explained to her audience:
You can join this campaign by simply signing your name to a pre-written
letter and tracing your hand on a red piece of construction paper after
this [speech]. I will then cut and paste your handprint to your letter and
forward them on to the UN.
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