Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is a framework for persuasive speeches

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On June 13, 2025 I blogged about how The Four Part Close for a speech is also known as “The Lehrman Landing”. In that post I linked to an article by David Murray at Pro Rhetoric on May 25, 2025 titled “The Lehrman Landing” – and Other Jargon Speechwriters Should Use Constantly. He said another jargon item was:

 

“Monroe’s Motivated Sequence is an all-purpose speech structure codified in the 1950s by a Purdue University engineer geek named Alan Monroe. Or, if you want to mesmerize a gullible marketing executive, you could say the structure is inspired by the breathy oratorical style of Marilyn Monroe.”

 

There is a Wikipedia page for it. A paraphrase for its five steps is:

 

Attention

Capture audience interest with a compelling opening.

 

Need

Show there is a problem affecting the audience.

 

Satisfaction

Offer a practical and believable solution.

 

Visualization

Help the audience see benefits for the solution.

 

Action

Directly tell the audience what to do next.    

 

A succinct description is in a University of South Carolina UPSTATE Library Guide web page titled SPCH 201 H: Honors Public Speaking: Monroe’s Motivated Sequence Outline. Also, there is a recent article by Nazli Turken and Steven D. Cohen at ORMS TODAY informs on December 6, 2024 titled The science of effective presentations: Using Monroe’s Motivated Sequence to convey analytical findings.

 

 

How to make interesting arguments about a persuasive speech topic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the web site for Parade magazine there is an article by Maryn Liles on March 29, 2021 titled 100 Good persuasive speech topics that’ll help you get an A+ in your public speaking class. She says three things to think about are to make sure that:

1] The speech topic is something you are interested in learning

2] The speech topic is something people (your audience) care about

3] You can make interesting and unique arguments about that topic

 

But she doesn’t say how to make those arguments. How can you find which already have been made by others? On January 17, 2019 I blogged about Two library databases and a web site for exploring both sides of controversial issues. The web site is ProCon which currently is called Brittanica ProCon. Depending on who supplies your state library system with their databases, your public library also may provide Opposing Viewpoints in Context from Gale, or Points of View Reference Center from EBSCO.  

 

A strong ending is very persuasive

On February 26, 2020 there was a hilarious F Minus cartoon by Tony Carrillo captioned:

“Jen, that presentation made almost no sense at all, but it finished so strong I’ve decided to push ahead with your plan.”

The most recently presented information may be remembered best, as Kendra Cherry discussed at Verywellmind in an article on April 23, 2019 titled What is the Recency Effect?

A cartoon of a flirty woman with money was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

In 2009 persuasion likely accounted for 30% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), or about 4.56 trillion dollars. What percent of GDP was due to persuasive public speaking?

On January 4, 2019 at Inc. there was an article by Carmine Gallo titled Public speaking is no longer a ‘soft skill.’ It’s your key to success in any field. A section on The Growing Value of Changing Minds began:

“In a world built on ideas, the persuaders – the ones who can win hearts and change mind – have a competitive edge. I’ve spoken to economists and historians like Deidre McCloskey at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She conducted an impressive research project to prove that old fashioned rhetoric – persuasion – is responsible for a growing share of America’s national income.

McCloskey analyzed 250 occupations covering 140 million people in the U.S. She created a statistical model based on the amount of time people in each category spent on public speaking and persuading another person to take action. In some cases persuasion played a more limited role than others (think firefighters versus public relations specialists).

McCloskey reached the following conclusion: Persuasion is responsible for generating one-quarter of America’s total national income. She expects it to rise to 40 percent over the next twenty years. McCloskey’s research was taken up by another economist in Australia who reached a similar conclusion.”

The Australian economist was Gerry Antioch, who discussed his research on the percentage of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in an article from 2013 in issue 1 of Economic Roundup titled Persuasion is now 30 per cent of US GDP (revisiting McCloskey and Klamer after a quarter of a century). That earlier article by McCloskey and Klamer was published in the May 1995 issue of The American Economic review on pages 191 to 195 and titled One Quarter of GDP is Persuasion. Table 1 of Antioch’s article shows the details of McCloskey and Klamer’s “inspired guesstimate,” of 26% for 1993 - which actually includes just 21 of those 250 occupations. There were four categories with weights of 1.00 (4 occupations), 0.75 (9 occupations), 0.50 (6 occupations), and 0.25 (2 occupations). They also made estimates from data for the years 1983, 1988, and 1991. Antioch made estimates for 2003 and 2009.

The first bar chart shown above presents the percentages for persuasion from all six estimates. A second bar chart restates them in current dollars based on GDP. A press release on November 16, 2015 from the Association of National Advertisers reported that research sponsored by them found that advertising alone contributed 19% to the U.S. GDP in 2014, or $3.4 trillion.

How much of these percentages or dollars can be attributed just to either storytelling or public speaking? Back in 2002 Stephen Denning published an article in the RSA Journal titled How storytelling ignites action in knowledge-era organizations in which he guessed storytelling made up two-thirds of persuasion. Then on page xvi of his 2005 book The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling he said it conservatively was at least half of persuasion.  In their 2014 book Business Storytelling for Dummies Karen Dietz and Lori Silverman mention Denning’s 2005 book and link to Antioch’s article.

What about public speaking? Page 324 in Chapter 15 of Stephen Lucas’s book The Art of Public Speaking (10th edition, 2008) just mentions the 26% persuasion estimate as being from a Wall Street Journal version of a January 10, 1995 Associated Press article about McCloskey and Klamer by Amanda Bennett titled Economists + Meeting A Zillion Causes and Effects. If Stephen Denning can guess a half for storytelling, than I can take a wild guess of a fifth for persuasive public speaking, and come up with the dollar estimates shown above in a third bar chart. So, it might be over $912 billion! 

          

Making Your Case: the art of persuading judges

In 2008 the late Antonin Scalia (then an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) and Bryan A. Garner (editor-in-chief of Black’s Law Dictionary) put out a book titled Making Your Case: the art of persuading judges. It’s a detailed treatment of a specialized form of persuasive speaking that I found quite fascinating. 

That book is divided into four main topics:

General Principles of Argumentation (sections 1 to 21)
Legal Reasoning (sections 22 to 27)
Briefing (sections 28 to 54)
Oral Argument (sections 55 to 115)

Each topic is divided into sub-topics, and finally into pithy, brief sections. The longest sub-topic, on Oral Argument, contains

introduction  (section 55)
long term preparation (sections 56 to 58)
preliminary decision: who will argue (sections 59 and 60)
months and weeks before argument (sections 61 to 71)
before you speak (sections 72 to 76)
substance of argument (sections 77 to 88)
manner of argument (sections 89 to 100)
handling questions (sections 101 to 111)
after the battle (sections 112 to 115)


Under Manner of Argument there are the following sections:

 89. Look the judges in the eye. Connect.
 90. Be conversational but not familiar.
 91. Use correct courtroom terminology.
 92. Never read an argument; never deliver it from memory except the opener and perhaps the closer.
 93. Treasure simplicity.
 94. Don’t chew your fingernails.
 95. Present your argument as truth, not your opinion.
 96. Never speak over a judge.
 97. Never ask how much time you have left.
 98. Never (or almost never) put any other question to the court.
 99. Be cautious about humor.
100. Don’t use visual aids unintelligently.


Section 93 on page 182 says to Treasure simplicity:

“Express your ideas in a straightforward fashion, not circuitously - and in plain words. When you describe events, treat them chronologically.

Avoid pretentious expressions. You’re trying to get judges to understand a case, not to impress them with your erudition. Your job is to make a complex case simple, not to make a simple case sound complex. This end is best achieved by clear thoughts simply expressed.

Part of simplicity is brevity. Get to the point. Don’t meander in leading up to it or embellish it once made. Every fact, every observation, every argument that does not positively strengthen your case positively weakens it by distracting attention.”


Section 42 on pages 111 and 112 says To clarify abstract concepts, give examples:

“Legal briefs are necessarily filled with abstract concepts that are difficult to explain. Nothing clarifies their meaning as well as examples. One can describe the interpretive canon noscitur a sociis as the concept that a word is given meaning by the words with which it is associated. But the reader probably won’t really grasp what you’re talking about unless you give an example similar to the one we gave earlier: ‘pins, staples, rivets, nails, and spikes.’ In that context ‘pins’ couldn’t refer to lapel ornaments, ‘staples’ couldn’t refer to standard foodstuffs, ‘nails’ couldn’t refer to fingernails, and ‘spikes’ couldn’t refer to hairstyles.”


Here in Idaho there is an excellent recent illustration of giving specific examples. Governor Otter just vetoed the Use of the Bible in Public Schools Bill, Senate Bill 1342. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll, R-Cottonwood, had argued the Bible is not a sect or a denomination, since it’s used by everyone. Nuxoll told a Senate committee she considers the Bible to be universal.

A brief video of Lawrence Wasden, the Attorney General, gives specific examples of why various versions of the Bible (such as the King James version from the Church of England or Anglicans) are books of a denominational character, and thus clearly violate the Idaho state constitution.   

The image of a judge and a cowboy came from a 1902 Puck magazine at the Library of Congress.

Stealing Thunder: say the worst, but say it first

Some presentation tactics go against common sense. Suppose that you are giving a panel presentation about a controversial topic. You know there is a weakness in your case - negative information that would damage your position.

Should you:
[1]. Make sure to bring it up before your opponent does.
[2]. Ignore it and hope that he or she does not bring it up.

Trial lawyers know that the correct answer is [1]. Being proactive with bad news in order to soften its impact is known as “stealing thunder”. (Psychologists call it inoculation. Lawyers do it because it usually works, as has been shown in research by Kipling Williams.

Examples of this tactic show up on TV shows such as “Law and Order”. Sam Waterston, who plays District Attorney Jack McCoy, said that he not only has to make the prosecution case, but also has to make the defense’s case before they do.

Stealing thunder is 300 years old. The cartoon showing Daniel Webster stealing Henry Clay’s thunder is somewhat younger.