A persuasive speech tries to change what an audience believes or does, and the ones that work usually ask for something specific: a vote, a pilot program, a rule, a signature. They state the ask early, give two or three reasons the audience cares about, and answer the strongest objection before anyone in the room can raise it.
Below are four complete speeches, each built for a different kind of resistance, from a room that doesn't see the problem to one that already has reasons to say no.
Four structures, four speeches
Persuasive speeches are organized around where the audience starts. The same topic can need a different structure in front of a different room, so pick the pattern after you know who is listening.
| Structure | Use it when the audience… | Example below | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| StructureProblem–cause–solution | Use it when the audience…doesn't see the problem yet, or blames the wrong cause | Example belowLater school start times | LengthAbout 3 minutes |
| StructureComparative advantages | Use it when the audience…agrees on the problem but not on the fix | Example belowOpen textbooks for intro courses | LengthAbout 2¾ minutes |
| StructureRefutation | Use it when the audience…already has reasons to say no | Example belowPhones away during class | LengthAbout 3 minutes |
| StructureMonroe's motivated sequence | Use it when the audience…agrees in principle but needs a push to act | Example belowA four-day week pilot | LengthAbout 3 minutes |
Problem–cause–solution: school start times
Problem–cause–solution suits audiences who haven't felt the problem themselves. You show it, show where it really comes from, then offer a fix aimed at that cause. Here a high school junior speaks during public comment at a school board meeting. The labels mark each part, including where the speech meets its strongest objection; they are for study, not for saying aloud.
Audience: a school board that hasn't been asked to think about start times. Ask: a vote tonight to form a committee that reports back by March.
Opening and ask. Good evening. My name is Priya Raman, I'm a junior at Westfield High, and I'm here to ask the board to study moving our first bell from 7:25 to 8:30.
Problem. The problem first. Last month the student council asked every junior and senior how much they sleep on a school night. Of the 612 who answered, 401 said six hours or less. That's two out of three. In first period you can see it. Half my AP Chemistry class has their heads down before the lab starts, and these are students who chose AP Chemistry.
Cause. It isn't that we stay up for fun. The American Academy of Pediatrics says teenagers need eight and a half to nine and a half hours of sleep. Our body clocks shift later during adolescence, which is why falling asleep at ten is hard for most of us. A student who falls asleep at eleven needs to sleep until seven to get even eight hours. Our buses leave at 6:40.
So the cause isn't our habits. It's the clock. That's why, in 2014, the same academy recommended that middle and high schools start at 8:30 or later.
Solution. Here's the solution I'm asking you to study: start Westfield High at 8:30, and flip the bus schedule so the elementary schools run first. Other districts have made this change, and the board can ask them what it cost and what they would do differently.
Strongest objection, answered. I know the strongest objection, because I heard it at my own dinner table: sports. A later start means later practice, later dinner, later homework. That's real. But our athletic director told the council that most home games already start at 4:30, and practice could move from 2:45 to 3:45 without losing a field. It's an hour. It's not a season.
The ask, sized down. So here's exactly what I'm asking for tonight. Not a vote on the change. A vote to form a committee of parents, teachers, coaches, the transportation office and two students, with a report back by March. If the numbers don't work, the report will say so.
Close. Two out of three of us walk into first period on six hours of sleep. Please vote yes on the committee. Thank you.
How it argues. The problem is a local number the board can check, two out of three, plus one picture from a classroom. The cause is moved off the students and onto the schedule, with an outside authority behind it, and the rest of the argument depends on that shift. The solution comes with a way to pay for it in buses rather than dollars. The strongest objection arrives late, after the solution and just before the final ask, introduced from the speaker's own dinner table so it sounds fair, and it gets a number back: an hour, not a season. The smartest choice is the size of the ask. A committee is far easier to say yes to than the change itself, and it puts the change on the board's agenda. More topics in this vein are in persuasive speech topics.
Comparative advantages: open textbooks
When the audience already agrees there's a problem, spending three minutes proving it wastes their patience. Comparative advantages concedes the problem at once and argues that your solution beats the others on the measures they care about. Here a student senator speaks to a faculty senate.
Audience: faculty who agree textbooks cost too much but disagree about the fix. Ask: a one-year pilot of open textbooks in two intro courses, with a report back.
Thank you for having me. I'm Daniel Osei, and I represent the student senate.
I don't need to convince anyone here that textbooks cost too much. You've all had students who wait until the second week of class to buy the book, or never buy it. Last spring the senate surveyed students in our six biggest intro courses, and 38 percent said they'd skipped buying at least one required book because of the price. So the question in front of you isn't whether there's a problem. It's which fix works best.
There are three options on the table. We can keep things as they are and grow the emergency book fund. We can join the rental program the bookstore proposed. Or we can move intro courses to open textbooks: openly licensed books that are free to read online and cost about twenty dollars to print.
Here's how they compare. The book fund helps the students who ask for help, and most students don't ask. Rentals cut the price roughly in half, but half of a $210 calculus book is still a $105 book, and the online access codes can't be rented at all. Open textbooks cost nothing, and every student has the book on the first day of class, which is when the course starts whether they've paid or not.
The fair objection is quality, and it deserves a straight answer. Not every subject has a good open textbook. Some do. Our biology and statistics faculty reviewed the open books for their courses last year, and both departments said they would teach from them. Start there. The departments decide. Nobody here is asking anyone to adopt a book they don't trust.
So my ask is specific: a one-year pilot of open textbooks in intro biology and intro statistics, starting next fall, with a report to this senate on grades, withdrawals and what students paid. That's two courses and about nine hundred students a year.
If it doesn't work, you'll know in a year, and you'll have the data. If it does, nine hundred students start the semester with the book in their hands. Thank you.
How it argues. The problem gets one paragraph, enough to show the speaker has evidence, and then the speech moves to the real disagreement. All three options are named fairly, including the one the speaker opposes, and judged on the same three tests: who gets helped, what it costs and whether the book arrives on day one. The quality objection is answered with the faculty's own judgment, which respects the senate's authority instead of arguing with it. The ask is small, measured and reversible, and the close states both outcomes, so a yes risks little more than a year.
Refutation: phones away during class
If the audience already has reasons to say no, the speech has to be about those reasons. The refutation pattern states the case briefly, then takes the objections one by one, in the audience's own words. Here a teacher speaks to colleagues at a faculty meeting.
Audience: colleagues who have heard the phone debate before and lean toward no. Ask: a one-semester trial of phone caddies in every class, starting in January.
I want to make the case for one rule, and then spend most of my time on the reasons not to adopt it, because I've heard all of them, including from myself.
The rule: phones go in the caddy by the door at the start of every class and come back out when the bell rings. Every class, every teacher, so nobody is the strict one.
Here's why I've come around. I started doing this in my own room in September. In October I compared my two sections of tenth-grade English with the same sections last year: same unit, same essay. The average essay was about a page longer, and I stopped spending the first five minutes of every class asking people to put their phones away. That's one teacher's numbers, not a study. But I suspect it matches what many of you see.
Now the objections.
“What about emergencies?” This is the one parents raise, and it deserves the most care. Our safety plan already tells students to listen to the adult in the room during an emergency. A phone in a caddy is six feet away, not locked in a building across town, and the office line still reaches every classroom.
“Phones are learning tools.” Sometimes they are. When I want students to look something up, the phones come out, on purpose, for that task, and go back in the caddy afterward. The rule isn't no phones. It's no phones by default.
“We should teach responsibility instead of banning things.” I agree that's the goal. But we don't teach responsibility by handing a fifteen-year-old a device designed to be hard to put down and then grading them on resisting it alone. We teach it the way we teach anything hard: structure first, then less of it. Seniors could earn the right to keep phones on their desks in the spring.
So my proposal is a one-semester trial, in every class, starting in January, with a short survey of students and teachers in May. If it doesn't help, we drop it.
The caddies cost about forty dollars a room. I've already priced them. I'd like to order them on Friday.
How it argues. The speaker spends a sentence on the case and most of the speech on the objections, which tells skeptical colleagues they have been heard. Each objection is quoted the way people actually say it, then partly conceded: emergencies deserve care, phones can be tools, responsibility is the goal. Conceding what is true makes the rebuttals easier to believe. The evidence is honest about its limits (“one teacher's numbers, not a study”), which a room of teachers is more likely to trust than an overstated claim. And the close makes the ask concrete and cheap: forty dollars a room, an order on Friday.
Monroe's motivated sequence: a four-day week
Monroe's motivated sequence is a five-step structure developed by the speech professor Alan H. Monroe at Purdue University in the 1930s: attention, need, satisfaction, visualization and action. It suits a speech that ends in a request for action. Here a support manager proposes a pilot to the company's leadership team. The step labels are for study, not for saying aloud.
Audience: a leadership team that likes the idea in principle but worries about coverage. Ask: approval for a six-month pilot of a four-day week, starting in January.
Attention. Last year, eleven people left our customer support team. The team has fourteen seats. We spent the year hiring and training, and for most of it we were short at least two people.
Need. When we ask people why they leave, the answer in exit interviews is rarely money. It's that the work never stops: a queue that refills overnight, upset customers all day and no time to recover before the next shift. Every person we lose costs us about three months of a new hire's training before they're fully up to speed, and the people who stay carry that load. Our first-reply time has gotten worse in each of the last three quarters.
Satisfaction. I'm proposing a six-month pilot of a four-day week for the support team: four days, the same pay, the same coverage. We'd split the team into two groups with staggered days off, so the queue is covered Monday through Friday exactly as it is now. We'd cut two recurring meetings and move the weekly report to the dashboard to win back the hours.
This has been tested elsewhere. In 2022, 61 companies in the United Kingdom ran a six-month four-day-week trial, studied by researchers at Boston College, the University of Cambridge and other universities. Afterward, 56 of them kept going, and 18 made it permanent. Their results aren't ours, which is why I'm asking for a pilot, not a policy.
The fair worry is coverage, and the pilot is built around it. If first-reply time or customer satisfaction gets more than ten percent worse for two months running, we end the pilot early. No debate.
Visualization. Picture next summer if it works. A support team that's fully staffed for the first time in two years. People who come in on Monday rested instead of dreading the queue. A job posting that stands out because it says “four days.” Now picture it if we change nothing: another year of eleven departures, another year of training people to leave.
Action. I'm asking for approval to start the pilot on the first Monday in January, with a review at the end of June. The schedule and the measures are attached. I'd like an answer by the end of the month, so we can tell the team before the holidays.
How it argues. Attention is a number that is also the problem, eleven of fourteen. Need uses evidence leadership already owns, exit interviews and reply times, so nobody can dismiss it as opinion. Satisfaction pairs the plan with a stop rule, which answers the coverage objection before anyone voices it, and the outside evidence is offered as context rather than proof. Visualization paints both futures, the one with the pilot and the one without it, the contrast version of the step. Action is a start date and a deadline for the decision. For the individual techniques at work here, from ethos, pathos and logos to concession, see persuasive techniques.
Persuasive speeches from history
These four speeches are in the public domain. The passages below are excerpts, not the full texts, and each is worth reading for one move a modern speaker can borrow.
Patrick Henry: respect the other side first
No man thinks more highly than I do of the patriotism, as well as abilities, of the very worthy gentlemen who have just addressed the House. But different men often see the same subject in different lights; and, therefore, I hope it will not be thought disrespectful to those gentlemen if, entertaining as I do opinions of a character very opposite to theirs, I shall speak forth my sentiments freely and without reserve.
…
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Henry was answering delegates who wanted to keep seeking peace with Britain, and he begins by praising them. That compliment lets the disagreement be about the question rather than about the people, and it buys him the right to speak “freely and without reserve.” The close is a run of short questions with only one answer left standing. One caution: no transcript was made on the day. The text everyone quotes was reconstructed by Henry's biographer William Wirt more than forty years later, from the recollections of men who had been there, so treat its exact wording with care.
Frederick Douglass: start on the audience's ground
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?
…
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.
The speech is built on a turn. For its first part Douglass praises the founders before an audience that came to celebrate them: “The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men.” Then he asks the question above, and the praise becomes the measure of the nation's failure. The second passage explains why he refuses to argue the obvious; debating it would grant that it was open. The move to borrow is the first one: begin on ground the audience already holds, then show them where it leads. Other passages from the speech are annotated in speech examples.
Susan B. Anthony: state the strong claim up front
Friends and fellow citizens: I stand before you tonight under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen's rights, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any state to deny.
Many persuasive speeches hold the claim back until the evidence is in. Anthony puts hers in the second sentence, at full strength: not that she should be forgiven, but that she committed no crime. The rest of the speech proves it from documents her listeners already accepted, the Constitution's preamble and the dictionary definitions of a citizen. Opening with the strong claim works when you can back it, because it tells the audience exactly what to check you against. She was convicted and fined $100, which she refused to pay.
Abraham Lincoln at Cooper Union: count
The sum of the whole is, that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty-one—a clear majority of the whole—certainly understood that no proper division of local from federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories; while all the rest probably had the same understanding.
…
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Lincoln's opponents claimed the founders were on their side, so he did the homework. He went through the records of how the thirty-nine signers of the Constitution had acted on federal control of slavery in the territories, walked his New York audience through them, and only then gave the total above. The speech is often credited with helping win him the Republican nomination three months later. The lesson for any persuasive speech: when the other side says history or the data is theirs, count, and show your count. Then end, as he did, by turning from the argument to what the listener should do.
How to write your own persuasive speech
- Write the ask in one sentence
“I want the board to form a committee by March.” If you can't say what you want and from whom in one sentence, the audience won't be able to either.
- Find out where the audience starts
Do they see the problem? Agree on the fix? Already lean against you? The answer picks the structure from the table at the top.
- Choose two or three reasons they care about
Not the reasons that convinced you; the ones that matter to this room. A school board cares about students and budgets, a leadership team about retention and coverage.
- Write the objection in their words
Then concede what's true in it and answer the rest, ideally with a number. A speech that skips the obvious objection can lose the people who were thinking it the whole time.
If you can't tell which objection is strongest, ask the Strokes Assistant to read your draft as the most skeptical person in the room and name the claim it would attack first.
- Make the ask small and specific
A pilot, a committee, a trial with an end date. Small asks are easier to approve, and they can put the larger change on the agenda.
- Read it aloud with a timer
At about 130 words a minute, a three-minute speech is roughly 400 words. Cut the weakest reason whole rather than trimming every paragraph. The speech outline template has a time budget for each part, and how to end a speech covers closing on the ask.
Frequently asked questions
What are the three types of persuasive speeches?
Public speaking textbooks usually sort them by the question they answer. A speech on a question of fact argues that something is or isn't true. A speech on a question of value argues that something is good or bad, right or wrong. A speech on a question of policy argues for a specific action, the most common kind in classrooms and meetings.
How do you start a persuasive speech?
Say who you are and what you're asking for within the first thirty seconds, then give the audience a reason to care: a number, a short story or a question from their own experience. Audiences listen differently once they know where a speech is going, and an early ask gives every later argument something to support.
How long is a persuasive speech?
Classroom persuasive speeches usually run three to seven minutes, and public comment at meetings is often limited to two or three. At about 130 words a minute with pauses, that's roughly 260 to 900 words. Check the time limit before you draft, and leave room for nerves, which speed most speakers up.
What is the difference between a persuasive and an argumentative speech?
The terms overlap. An argumentative piece relies mainly on evidence and reasoning to prove a position. A persuasive speech also draws on the speaker's credibility and the audience's feelings to move them toward a belief or an action. In practice, a good persuasive speech is built on a sound argument and adds appeals to character and emotion.
