To persuade is to sell something to an audience. You can sell a product, a service, an idea, a belief – all fall under the persuasive branch of writing. The best way to organize a persuasive paper then is to follow the most successful sales strategy in the world called Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.
Monroe’s Motivated Sequence (MMS) is an organizational pattern used to develop a sense of want or need in the audience, satisfy that want or need, and to help the audience get enthused about the advantages of that solution.
Before presenting MMS, it is important to understand the difference between a need and a want. A need, according to Webster, is a "necessity." A want, also according to Webster, is "a desire for." Note the difference.
A need is something that fills a significant, life-sustaining void. For example, we need food, water, and shelter. We need money to secure our needs. We need other people.
A want, on the other hand, is something we would like to have, but does not affect our lives in a significant way. A salad shooter may fill a want, but it does not affect our lives in significant ways.
Why is this distinction important? Knowing whether to build a need or want tells you what your focus is going to be. If you take your topic as fulfilling a want, and you sell it as if it were fulfilling a need, your audience may be offended. If, on the other hand, you sell a need as a want, you may miss some strong persuasive appeals. Thus, you need to determine and adhere to what kind of appeal you are going to build—a need or a want.
Next, decide what you want to do with your topic. What is the purpose?
Are you persuading the audience to buy something -- a product or service?
Are you trying to win votes for an election?
Do you want the audience to storm city hall to fight some injustice?
Do you want the audience to send money to the poor?
After deciding your purpose, use the following outline to complete your paper.
MMS consists of five steps:
1. Attention
to get audience to listen and read on
"I want to hear what you have to say"
Startling Statement
Look around your classroom for a moment. Familiarize yourself with your fellow students. They are your acquaintances, competition, friends. Now let’s leap into the future ten years to your 10th year class reunion. Two of you will be doctors, three will be lawyers, one will be unemployed, and eight of you will be dying from AIDS.
Rhetorical Question
Death. It’s a topic all of us have considered. In fact, there comes a moment in all of our lives when we realize that we are mortal. That’s a monumental moment. Do you remember where you were when you first realized it? Strange. Why don’t we remember it?
Do you every wonder…
Story line
Tell a brief story highlighting the problem.
2. Need
to get audience to feel a need or want
"I agree. I have that need/want"
3. Satisfaction
to tell audience how to fill need or want
"I see your solution will work"
4. Visualization
to get audience to see benefits of solution
"This is a great idea"
5. Action
to get audience to take action
"I want it"
For your persuasive paper, you need to use MMS something like this:
Step 1: Get Attention through the use of attention-getting devices, you will aim to do two basic things: get the audience’s attention, and ease the audience into the topic.
Step 2: Build the Need/Want. In this step you will work to get your audience to feel a need or want, whichever you determine to be appropriate. This is accomplished in four ways:
A. Statement: give a definite, concise statement of what the need or want is.
B. Illustration: give one or more examples illustrating the need or want. This is where you try to "paint pictures" verbally to get the audience to feel that need or want.
C. Ramification: here you can offer additional evidence, such as statistics/testimony/examples, which give even more weight to the need or want.
D. Relation: this is where you really point out how this need or want is directly related and important to the audience.
Step 3: Satisfy the Need/Want. In this step, you will now fill the need/want you built in the last step. It is vital that you be consistent; i.e., be sure the solution you offer really does fit the need/want. There are five parts here:
A. Statement: tell your audience in a very specific, direct sentence what it is you want them to do (THIS IS THE FIRST TIME WE WILL HAVE HEARD WHAT IT IS YOU ARE SELLING)
B. Explanation: tell us about your solution. Make sure we understand what exactly it is you are selling.
C. Theoretical Demonstration: This is where you make it clear how your solution fulfills the need you built in step 2.
D. Reference to Practical Experience: if you have external evidence supporting the value of your solution, here is where you plug it in.
E. Meeting Objections: here you anticipate counter-arguments and you pre-empt them, i.e., address them before the audience has time to actually think them up.
Step 4: Visualizing the Results In this step you are working to intensify your audience’s desire for your solution. This is often called the projection step because it looks forward to the future. There are three options here:
· Option A: The Positive Method: Using this method, you offer vivid descriptions of how much better the person’s life will be as a result of buying your idea.
Option B: The Negative Method: Using this method, you offer vivid descriptions of how bad the person’s life will be as a result of not buying your idea.
Option C: The Contrast Method: Using this method, you combine the previous two methods, addressing negatives first, and positives second.
Step 5: Call for Action This step is the final call for the audience to actually make the purchase, the “let’s do it!” step. It should be brief, powerful, and well worded. End on a strong note.
1. Careful of repetition. It is very easy to find yourself repeating points from one step in another step. For instance, the attention step should not get into need building. Or in step four, visualization, don’t repeat things from step 3.
2. Be sure to do all steps. Frequently, writers start a persuasive paper with “I’m here to sell you. . .” Clearly, that is the statement from step 3. Be sure to use some sort of attention getting device and build the need/want first.
3. Be sure to take time to build the need. Sometimes writers assume the value of their plan is so straightforward that the audience will automatically agree with them. Don’t be fooled by this. Take the opposite approach: assume no one will agree with you, then, build your case. Granted, need/want building is less “definite,” but it is vital.
4. Be sure to use clear “statements” at the beginning of the steps. This allows for clear transitions.
5. Be sure your solution meets the needs/wants you describe. In other words, make sure your solution has solvency. Solvency is when your solution really does fill the need/want developed in step 2.
6. Be sure that within step 3, you address means, opportunity, and incentive. At the beginning of the paper, you had to decide why you were persuading. Here, you tell the audience what they can do. If you are persuading people to send money to a mission in Nicaragua, you will fail if you just make them sad for the poor children. You need to show the people how they can make themselves feel better by sending money. That’s what this final step does. Means addresses how your audience can buy the product. Opportunity addresses how your audience access the product. Incentive addresses additional motivations for buying.
For example, the Nicaraguan mission, the means would be a credit card, sending a check or money order, or COD. Opportunity is the toll-free number. Incentive is the premium that goes along with it (such as the picture of the child you adopt and a personal letter each month). If you are trying to sell a quit smoking program, means will be how they pay you for it, opportunity might be offering the classes at times convenient for them, and incentive might be a half-price offer or a money back guarantee.
Read the following example. Look for the MMS steps within the essay. Is the essay effective? Does it persuade?
Underground Convenience
People say that travel is the best form of education. I agree. Of course you can learn things anywhere, but being thrust into a completely new environment heightens the senses preparing the mind to absorb each detail. Recently, I traveled to Madrid, Spain. Flying into Barajas Airport, I realized I didn’t know how to get into the city. Looking at the magazine provided by the airlines, I noticed that the metro ran from the airport to the city, so I thought I’d give it a try.
Twelve minutes after boarding Metro Line 8, I was standing in the center of Madrid taking in the sights. Even better, the trip cost about one dollar – one dollar for a twelve-minute trip into the capital city. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, all the European countries that I have visited have functioning mass transit systems that move thousands of people effortlessly around the cities and surrounding areas. Why don’t we? I mean, are Hungary and the Czech Republic that far ahead of us technologically? In Pittsburgh, a traveler from the center city to the airport needs to allow an hour of transit time in case of traffic jams. Once at the airport, the traveler needs to park, which seems to increase in cost each month. So, once the traveler negotiates the tunnel traffic, makes it to the airport, hunts for a parking place, and catches the transit bus to the terminal, he probably wonders why Pittsburgh can’t have a mass transit system?
Well, first of all the United States will never have a nationwide rail system like the European countries. Geographically, we are simply too large for such a task. Even regional train lines – for trips of 150-300 miles – would be a difficult sell. Being a young country, The United States grew up with the automobile, which has become part of our national psyche. I don’t suggest we give that up. What I do suggest is a metro express system from the Pittsburgh International Airport to Downtown to show the relevance of a regional mass transit system.
Currently, Pittsburgh has a small light rail system that serves only a fraction of the South Hills communities to the downtown area. Even so, that one line relieves a great deal of congestion on the roads during rush hours. Imagine a high-speed metro link from the airport to downtown. There would be stations along the route providing not only multiple access points for the airport, but also an added transit link into the city. This single line would relieve traffic on the Parkway West, one of the most congested links in the city. Seeing the convenience of the airport metro express line, people will demand other metro lines to connect Monroeville and Cranberry to the city center. The current light rail system could be expanded to serve major sections of the city to wisk people from the center to their jobs in the surrounding communities. For example, a person living in Moon Township who works in Lawrenceville would take the airport express metro into downtown, then transfer to a light rail car that could run the length of Liberty and Penn Avenues.
A metro express airport line would help in other ways, also. The airport contains a dying mall complex, because people refuse to pay to park at a mall. Imagine the convenience of taking the metro line to the airport to shop – not fly anywhere, just shop without parking hassles. People with layovers at the airport might venture into the city to spend some money if they knew they could be there in ten minutes for one dollar. Also, people would be more likely to fly regionally to Philadelphia, Washington, New York, or Atlantic City if they knew they could get to the airport cheaply and easily. But there has to be a down side to this metro.
Constructing any major transportation line can cause headaches, but these can be limited by an underground metro. Machines can safely tunnel under existing land with little to no disturbance. Most of the Pittsburgh region is already a maze of abandoned mine shafts from the steel-boom days. Pittsburghers currently live above tunnels that have no purpose. I propose to give purpose to these tunnels.
Imagine a network of rail tunnels connecting all of the surrounding communities. Madrid has an extensive underground metro system which links with commuter trains from the entire province. A friend of mine lives twenty-five miles outside Madrid. He takes a commuter train to work every morning. At the main train station, he transfers to the underground metro. It takes him thirty-five minutes to get from his home to his office for only sixty dollars per month or about two dollars per day. The normal Pittsburgher pays more than twice that per day just to park. And who can make it into the city from Monroeville in thirty-five minutes on a workday?
This proposal would put an end to congestion on our roadways, reduce auto emissions throughout the region, help the economy by encouraging travel, and save lives by reducing the number of cars on the road. Certainly this would be an enormous investment, but no more than the cost of new road construction and maintenance. The savings over ten years would more than repay the cost of construction.
So, I ask you: can you live in a world without traffic jams, polluted streets, and travel inconveniences? If so, an express metro line to the airport is the beginning. Don’t worry; I’m not suggesting we give up our cars. We would still use them. We just wouldn’t need to.
Final thought:Remember in persuasion that your audience can be divided into three groups (not always equal in size): those that already agree with you, those that disagree, and those undecided. Your job is to persuade the undecided without losing those who support you while leaving those that disagree questioning. If you can do this, you will be successful.
MMS, the short version. You can't possibly remember all those steps, so I've condensed them.1. Show a need exists2. Show audience they have the need3. Fulfill the need4. Tell how the world will be better with your solution5. Tell them what to do to make it happen