ABSTRACT
Now more than ever, in the arenas of national security, public relations, marketing; corporate management; personal relationship, persuasion, the art of communicating strategically is essential. This chapter provides a well-grounded understanding of available persuasive techniques that can be employed and applied to excel in different aspects of the readers’ life. It provides an overview of the key communication strategies to influence, engage and empower. Persuasive techniques used by celebrities and professionals in different sectors of the workplace are demonstrated and their impact highlighted.
Successful persuasion requires one to have the skills to access, analyse, evaluate, create various communication strategies in different situations and to use the key language features to achieve this purpose. The two main language features are content words and grammatical words. Content words carry specific meanings, such as nouns, adjectives and verbs. Grammatical words express a functional or structural relationship with other words in a sentence, such as prepositions providing more information about nouns, to-infinitive for giving reasons or telling purposes, and conjunctions indicating the relationship between ideas or events.
In the ever-changing workplace environment and globalised communication network, being able to set criteria and evaluate persuasiveness in one’s professional and personal lives is key to success.
