Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 2, The Power of Persuasion (7th-8th)
Hello, all you persuasive people!
Wow, wow, wow – we definitely have some innovative and savvy (pun intended) industry leaders within this class! Today, we learned about leveraging persuasive skills and tactics in selling, marketing, and advertising. Specifically, we focused on ways that we can pitch and advocate for ourselves from small things like convincing someone to do our chores (read on to find out why) to high-stakes investment negotiations. First, we had our first vocabulary trivia review and led in discussion about the ethics of the art of persuasion. Then we read and conducted a literary analysis of an excerpt from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer where Tom convinces his peers to whitewash a fence for him so successfully that by the end, the neighborhood youth are paying him to get to do his chores! We then discussed the what’s, why’s and how’s of a persuasion outcome’s success or failure. We discovered that, even with excellent arguments, reasoning, and use of the three big appeals (Pathos, Logos, and Ethos), a lot rides on knowing and tailoring your argument to your specific audience. We discussed how personal conviction, communication or learning style, values, and personality type all influence the way that an audience, client, investor, or adjudicator will receive our arguments.
It turns out we need to do more than structure a great argument, we also need to “sell” ourselves when we are trying to convince someone of something. In the workforce realm of pitching projects or ideas in the workplace, seeking investment capital, managing and directing teams, etc., who we are and how we relate to and appeal to others as individuals is just as important as understanding how to formulate an argument. Who would have thought? Time to apply our learning: we each chose a responsibility or chore that we disliked and in a flash-timed activity, we had to run around the room talking to convince as many people as possible to take on our chore. Our winners were successful because they highlighted some kind of benefit (like getting to play Minecraft with V’s interestingly nerdy brother) and made even the mundane or distasteful work sound enriching and desirable.
Our “Put It Into Action” afternoon was a mock Shark Tank investment sell. Our teams came up with a product, thought through its development and uses, constructed persuasive arguments that would appeal to one or all of our sharks, and – after putting in a ton of work – used both inductive and deductive reasoning to tailor a pitch for a multimillion-dollar investment. And our sharks were ruthless! We all had different backgrounds, values, and personalities and we asked incredibly tough questions about things like net profit margins, product marketability and longevity, production and distribution plans, accessibility, logistics, etc. I must tell y’all, we sharks left the day feeling so proud and incredibly impressed. Please ask your young industry innovator tonight about their team’s product and pitch strategy!
- Bonus question hint for students: Identify some of the syntactical rhetorical devices I use within this blog post (other than Pathos, Logos, and Ethos). You may have to do some internet research to find the correct names for this one.
- Bonus question hint: I mention two new reasoning skills we haven’t discussed yet. What are they? Find them and look them up – you just might be asked to give examples of them tomorrow. Good luck!
Just for fun: Students, ask your caregivers/parents what innovative product they would pitch to the SharkTank!
Until tomorrow,
Ms. Rho