Walking through the reasoning

If the evidence isn't overwhelmingly persuasive by itself, then the speaker might need to spend time walking the audience through their reasoning.

You don't see many modern print ads doing this anymore, but it used to be common back in the day.

For example, how does this ad for Avis rental cars attempt to persuade the audience?

Avis No 2 in rent a cars

How does this ad persuade the audience through argument?

Claim: Avis offers better service.

Reason: Being second in the industry means they can't afford not to. In fact, they need to try really hard to go above and beyond.

Evidence: Examples of things they can't afford to ignore, plus examples of exceptional customer service.

Also:

Character: This opens with warts and all and turns into virtue.

Emotion: It's a moving-towards piece, but it's subtle. Because they're not the biggest and best, they don't go with big emotions—instead they go with a kind of quiet intensity.

Here's another vintage print ad. How does it walk the audience through its reasoning? Where does it take them?

General Electric STEM ad Is your kid living in a dream world

How does this ad persuade the audience through argument?

Claim: Parents should encourage their smart and talented kids to go into engineering instead of entertainment.

Reason: Entertainment is ultra-competitive and most kids don't have what it takes to succeed. Whereas there is a vast demand for engineers, and there are many ways to succeed.

Evidence: List of the things you need to succeed in singing vs a list of opportunities in engineering.

Also:

Character: General Electric is relying on authority here.

Emotion: It's emotionally layered: there is some stillness and regret in letting go of a dream at the start, and then hope and forward motion in the opportunity to be an engineer.

We see a lot of persuasive reasoning in social media.

For instance, this Instagram Reel is from an account called The Happy Urbanist.

How does Jon, the speaker, use reasoning to persuade the audience?

Happy Urbanist IG reel about traffic scaling

(Watch the reel.)

"Why is Atlanta an hour away from *Atlanta*!?!?"

You can never make a road wide enough to alleviate traffic.

Scaling an inherently inefficient system makes the problem worse, not better. Like, if you sold oranges, for example, and you lost 10c for every orange you sold, selling more oranges makes your problem worse.

In the same way, when you add a lane to alleviate traffic, what you don't realize is that traffic reached a homeostasis. It got so bad that other people started changing their behavior to avoid that road. But as soon as you make that road wider, the people who stayed home will start driving on that road again, until it reaches the *same* homeostasis.

This is something known as induced demand.

It also happens because when you make a road wide enough that it's convenient, you have a parking problem, but when you build out parking that's convenient, you have a traffic problem.

Parking and extra lanes have this dyspiotic relationship, the opposite of symbiosis.

This is due largely in part to the fact that cars are one of the most inefficient forms of transportation. Look at how many people can be moved per hour in a car lane vs other forms of transportation.

So when you design a city and the only real option you give people is a car, your roads get wider and wider, your city gets bigger and bigger, the average mile per trip increases, and what you need to think about is each and every trip is a traffic-inducing trip, so if the average length of a trip is longer, you're inducing traffic for a longer period of time.

That's why if you look at cities that have doubled down on cars, like L.A., Houston, Atlanta, they have the *biggest* roads and the *worst* traffic.

Why you can't just add more lanes(2020)

How does this video persuade the audience through argument?

Claim: If you have a traffic problem, adding more lanes doesn't help.

Reasoning: If a road is popular enough that it has a traffic problem, adding more lanes does not distribute the traffic so much as attract more traffic. Traffic and parking compound each others' problems. Doubling down on roads and parking makes cities bigger, which increases the need to drive, which increases traffic.

Evidence: Hypotheticals, data, principles, examples of cities with traffic problems.

Also:

Character: Combination of expertise and mensch-like virtue.

Emotion: Calm, reflective, trying to get the audience to recognize a problem and stop heading in the wrong direction.

You can see from the comments on the reel that some people are not persuaded. We won't unpack it here, but you can see commenters disputing all parts of the argument including reasoning, principles, evidence, even the speaker's character.

That means there are two possibilities:

1. The speaker's reasoning is good, but it's still not enough to persuade some people in the audience.

2. The speaker's reasoning is bad, but some people in the audience are persuaded by it.

Neither of these are encouraging!

We won't try to resolve the argument one way or another here, but this is a good illustration of the limited power of persuasive reasoning.

We often find persuasive reasoning used in public speech, where there is time to develop a point.

For example, this snippet is from a speech by U.S. General Douglas Macarthur, who served in World Wars I & II.

How does he use reasoning to persuade the audience?

“Duty,” “honor,” “country” — those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you want to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they build. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation’s defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid.

They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for action; not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm, but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future, yet never neglect the past; to be serious, yet never take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness; the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

"Old Soldiers Never Die"(1951)

How does this speech persuade the audience through argument?

Claim: “Duty,” “honor,” and “country” are powerful ideas and values that you should organise your life around.

Reasoning: This snippet is interesting because MacArthur uses a rebuttal, dismissing pedants and cynics. Beyond that the reasoning is mainly causal: these values are important because they have many important effects.

Evidence: Long list of effects. Notice that these are all claims—why would you believe they are true?

Also:

Character: Authority & virtue—MacArthur had lived a life, so while his evidence is just claims dressed up as facts, the audience is more inclined to take his word for it because of who he is.

Emotion: Calm but resolute. Aspirational but grounded.

To practice using reasoning to persuade an audience, imagine you are trying to prevent this from happening again:

Use causal reasoning to explain what happened and how it could be prevented in future.

Use causal reasoning to convince an audience of what happened.

Reasoning backfires when it gives a hostile audience or stakeholders material to build a counterattack.

The speaker thinks they're making a series of good points, and then someone else tears them apart and turns the audience even further away from the speaker's goal.

Another weakness of reasoning is that it takes time and it can be difficult to keep the audience's attention.

Persuasive levers 1-4: Character, Emotion, Argument, & Combined

Walking through the reasoning