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Monroe’s Motivated Sequence This organizational pattern for your main points provides a way to effectively arrange a speech designed to incite immediate action in your audience. Alan Monroe, a professor at Purdue University, developed what we call Monroe’s Motivated Sequence in the 1930s. The five-step sequence combines psychological elements with speech persuasion in an effort to move an audience to action. First, Monroe advocated something the Greeks and Romans also called for: getting the attention of your audience. Then he argued a speaker should clearly lay out the need for change, something again advocated by the classical philosophers we discussed earlier. Once you clearly establish the need (problem), you satisfy the need by providing a solution to it. Fourth, Monroe’s sequence calls for you to intensify the audience’s desire for your solution to the problem by visualizing its success. This involves the use of imagery and asks the audience to actually see themselves doing what you call for and seeing the positive results—at least to see it in their mind’s eye. Finally, once you state your case and get your audience to visualize your solution’s success, you can use emotionally stirring language to tell them how to act to put the solution in place.2 As an example, suppose a student, Michelle, wants to persuade her audience to get involved in cleaning up a park on her campus that is strewn with trash and debris. She then composes the following order for her points using Monroe’s Motivated Sequence: Attention: “Do you think we should have a pleasant outdoor place to enjoy nature, to hang out with friends? To take walks, play sports, have cookouts, and entertain?” Need: “We do not have that on our campus, and there is a nearby park we could use, but it is overrun with weeds and trash and is currently unacceptable.” (Pictures would be a good visual aid at this juncture.) Satisfaction: “We could all pitch in, share the work, and it would not be that big of a burden on anyone.” Visualization: “A place to hang out, play ball, walk, enjoy fresh air and nature, and have cookouts—and we would have made that possible.” (Visuals of a beautiful outdoor setting would be effective at this point.) Action: “Will you join me in making this dream come true? Again, the work will be shared, and we will have made an improvement for all to enjoy.” Let’s take a moment and look at each one of these elements. The first step, gaining the audience’s attention, is nothing new; it simply employs a rhetorical question to raise the audience’s awareness of the speech topic. Any form of attention-getter we covered earlier in the book would be acceptable for this stage of Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. The second step of establishing need is a way of presenting a problem to the audience, but it differs slightly from the way we discussed it when we explained the problem-solution order. Of course, the need for the audience may be to solve a problem. In fact, solving a problem is a terrific motivator when the audience recognizes there is a dilemma that affects them and that needs to be resolved. That said, for Monroe’s Motivated Sequence, establishing a need can also include constructing, or illuminating, a need of which the audience may be unaware. For instance, in the above example, students on the campus may not really notice the need for the clean park because they may just have adapted to using other facilities for enjoying nature and entertaining. Also consider persuading an audience to purchase a particular product. The audience may not see a real need for making the purchase at the time, so the speaker needs to explain why the need does in fact exist. Not all problems that exist are obvious to an audience, and so sometimes speakers need to work extra hard to establish a need before persuading an audience to act. In short, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence recognizes that a speaker needs to both raise awareness of a problem and create a need to address it. Once the need has been established, you next must produce a way to satisfy the need. It would be tremendously awkward, and potentially frustrating, to tell people there is a problem but not give them a way to solve it! Monroe labels this step “satisfaction” because it is the point in the speech where the solution is provided and couched in a way that firmly satisfies the need. This can be accomplished through the proposal of a solution to specific policy or through encouraging an audience to take a particular course of action. Here is where you must offer solid reasoning and evidence to illustrate how your proposed solution will satisfy the need and why it is an appropriate and effective remedy for the problem facing the community. We must be mindful, however, when doing this that we do not fall into the trap of using reasoning fallacies in an effort to achieve our goal. The means of satisfying the need, and the tools we use to tell the audience about those means, are just as important as the end goal of attaining audience support and action. So, let us look at how we might go about accomplishing the satisfaction step in Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. In the example of the dirty park on campus, satisfaction is achieved through a group effort to clean the park. In the case of seeking to convince an audience to purchase a product, the speaker needs to show how the product will fulfill a personal need or desire for the audience. For example, if you tell an audience that bad breath is both unhealthy and unattractive and thus they need to keep it from occurring, then you need to tell them that the path to satisfying that need to avoid bad breath can be fulfilled by purchasing and using a certain brand of toothpaste. Monroe’s Motivated Sequence does not stop at satisfaction, however, as the next step is getting the audience to visualize fulfilling the need. Visualization uses concrete language and calls upon the audience to actually see themselves as the instruments of satisfying the established need. It helps the speaker further connect the audience with the issue, its solution, and the speaker by getting them to picture a future in which the need has been fulfilled. Such efforts employ both emotional and logical appeals to the audience. Ultimately, when the audience can see themselves taking part in an action that effectively satisfies a need for either themselves or the community, it becomes a simple task to call them to action—the final step of Monroe’s Motivated Sequence. You have been tasked with creating a brief one-minute advertisement for your school. The goal of this segment is to recruit prospective students to attend the school. The message will be delivered online as well as shown to families and students when they visit campus. It will also air periodically on campus television. Use Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to create this advertisement, and make sure you use all elements of the sequence in your advertisement. Write out a script for the advertisement. All told, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence represents a modernized pattern of organization for a balanced persuasive appeal to an audience. Its five steps are easy to follow as both a speaker and an audience and are most effective when immediate action is sought. Whether you are debating policy positions, factual accuracies, the value of one solution over another, or calling an audience to act, there are a wide variety of organizational patterns you can use in a persuasive speech. Just like informative speeches, persuasive speech arrangement largely depends on the formulation of your specific purpose, but once that is crafted, the speech can quickly take shape. Knowing the main parts of a speech and how to organize your main points can help you get ready to prepare your presentation. The most crucial step in speech creation remains organizing the product of your research in a cogent, coherent, and persuasive manner. For a summary of the organizational patterns for persuasive speeches covered in this chapter, see Table 13.3. TABLE 13.3: ORGANIZATIONAL PATTERNS FOR PERSUASIVE SPEECHES Problem-solution Problem-cause-solution Comparative advantage Monroe’s Motivated Sequence Alan H. Monroe (1903–1975) Photo of a photo of Alan H. Monroe. Alan H. Monroe served as a member of the faculty at Purdue University in Indiana beginning in 1924. He was initially hired as an instructor in English to teach basic courses in the English department. He quickly infused the English curriculum with classes such as Principles of Speech and Debating in English. Today, we recognize these topics as communication rather than English courses. Through Monroe’s efforts, Purdue University established a strong communication department known for teaching and research.3 In 1927, Monroe became the head of the speech faculty in the English department at Purdue, but he was not formally recognized in that role until 1941. Along with other members of the English department, Monroe led efforts during the 1930s to expand the curriculum, specifically adding courses in oral interpretation, public address, and debate. In 1935, Monroe published the first edition of his book Principles and Types of Speech, which is now in its sixteenth edition, a testament to the ingenuity and importance of what Monroe accomplished while at Purdue. In 1948, Purdue inaugurated its own PhD program in Speech Communication, largely through Monroe’s efforts. Monroe worked using relationships he had developed in the Purdue Department of Psychology to help push the Speech Communication Department toward a PhD program. He resigned as head of the department in 1963, after successfully creating an independent communication department, separate from English, with its own robust undergraduate and graduate curriculum.