Persuasive Acts

In June 2015, Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole in front of South Carolina’s state capitol and removed the Confederate flag. The following month, the Confederate flag was permanently removed from the state capitol. Newsome is a compelling example of a twenty-first-century woman rhetor, along with bloggers, writers, politicians, activists, artists, and everyday social media users, who give new meaning to Aristotle’s ubiquitous definition of rhetoric as the discovery of the “available means of persuasion.” Women’s persuasive acts from the first two decades of the twenty-first century include new technologies and repurposed old ones, engaged not only to persuade, but also to tell their stories, to sponsor change, and to challenge cultural forces that repress and oppress. Persuasive Acts: Women’s Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century gathers an expansive array of voices and texts from well-known figures including Hillary Rodham Clinton, Malala Yousafzai, Michelle Obama, Lindy West, Sonia Sotomayor, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, so that readers may converse with them, and build rhetorics of their own. Editors Shari J. Stenberg and Charlotte Hogg have complied timely and provocative rhetorics that represent critical issues and rhetorical affordances of the twenty-first century.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2019, held in Limassol, Cyprus, in April 2019. The 29 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The papers demonstrate how persuasive technologies can help solve societal issues. They were subsequently grouped in the following topical sections: Terminologies and methodologies; self-monitoring and reflection; systems development process; drones and automotives; ethical and legal aspects; special application domains; motivation and goal setting; personality, age and gender; social support; user types and tailoring.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2013, held in Sydney, NSW, Australia, in April 2013. The 16 revised full papers and 12 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The papers address not only typical persuasive domains like health and environment, but also cover emerging research topics, such as data safety and evaluation of persuasive technologies.

How can we preach persuasively without huckstering, manipulating, or coercing people? Sadly, we are seeing the fall of many pastors not for reasons of sexual immorality, but the pursuit of pride and power. The skillful use of marketing methods creates celebrity pastors who become significant influencers in the evangelical church. The lure of success is seductive, turning pastors into hucksters and Christians into consumers. We need to heed the warnings of the New Testament about the pride of rhetoric and the pursuit of power. David Christensen carefully analyzes the biblical warnings of Paul about the temptations of rhetorical sophistry in the first-century church and applies them to pastoral ministry today. God calls preachers to be ethical and effective persuaders. David develops an ethical grid for pastoral persuasion using principles drawn from the Bible and social science along with practical illustrations from his years of ministry. He calls preachers to be ethical and effective persuaders by emphasizing the centrality of the word of God while depending on the power of the Spirit of God.

Examining the applied media ethics question of professional persuasion, this special double issue resulted from a colloquium and conference on allowable ethical limits of deception in professional persuasion. Participants were invited to reason their way toward a threshold that would define acceptable deception for a professional persuader in pursuit of favorable market and public opinion conditions for a client. As a whole, this issue covers a broad range of views and expressions of opinion that often come close to defining the threshold between morally acceptable and morally outrageous persuasion.

Most people have to communicate with colleagues every day and persuade them to understand their opinions or to accept their views. This handbook is intended for anyone who is interested in such goal-oriented language. It extracts 300 persuasive tactics from research findings in communication, linguistics, pragmatics and related fields, and presents them in a clear, concise and consistent manner. Such tactics as analogy, argument presentation, humour and metaphor are included. Each tactic is presented on a separate page with an analysis of its persuasive value. Two indexes - one by persuasive need and the other by tactic - allow readers full flexibility to use the handbook in their own way. This work should be of interest in courses which deal with the management of interaction, pragmatics, discourse analysis and communications.

Gasché expounds on Aristotle, Heidegger, and Arendt in “a major interpretative achievement that underscores what is at stake in political thought” (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). As one of the most respected voices of Continental philosophy today, Rodolphe Gasché pulls together Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric, Martin Heidegger’s debate with theory, and Hannah Arendt’s conception of judgment in a single work on the centrality of these themes as fundamental to human flourishing in public and political life. Gasché’s readings address the distinctively human space of the public square and the actions that occur there, and his valorization of persuasion, reflection, and judgment reveals new insight into how the philosophical tradition distinguishes thinking from other faculties of the human mind. “Here Rodolphe Gasche is at his best: rigorous, scholarly, creative, forceful, laser focused on the issues at stake, learned, thoughtful, and original. He demands much of his readers, but reading his work is rewarding in ways that can be profoundly affecting.” —Dennis J. Schmidt, author of Between Word and Image “Rodolphe Gasche has long been one of the most meticulous readers of texts on the philosophical scene and here he once again offers a master class in how to do philosophy through interpretation.” —Robert Bernasconi, author of How to Read Sartre

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, PERSUASIVE 2012, held in Linköping, Sweden, in June 2012. The 21 full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. In addition three keynote papers are included in this volume. The papers cover the typical fields of persuasive technology, such as health, safety and education.