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.

George Pullman's lively and accessible introduction to the study of persuasion is an ideal text for use in courses where the understanding and practice of argumentation, rhetoric, and critical thinking are central. Continually challenging his readers to seek and recognize sound evidence, to question the obvious, and to assess and reassess the credibility of claims made by others--including the author's own--Pullman shows the way to strong writing, effective speaking, and rigorous critical thinking.

Conflict over moral, religious, social, political, and economic values fuel social movements. People form organized collectivities to promote or to oppose changes in societal norms and values. The steady growth in globalization and access to information have increased the perception of threats to identity, values, and culture. Persuasion and Social Movements provides a solid foundation for understanding how people collectively shape society. The latest edition marks three decades of synthesizing, applying, and extending research and theories about the persuasive efforts of social movements. Historic and current examples illustrate the many facets of social movement persuasion: Persuasion is inherently practical; we can study it most profitably by examining the functions of persuasive acts. Even apparently irrational acts make sense to the actoreffective analysis discovers the reasoning behind the acts. People create and comprehend their world through symbols, and it is people who create, use, ignore, or act on these symbolic creations. Although they remain important in social movement persuasion, speeches are now one of many resources for organizing and carrying out a variety of protests. New technologies have transformed how social movements come into existence, constitute organizations, establish coalitions, pressure institutions, and communicate with a wide variety of audiences. Social movements sometimes sell conspiracy theories to skeptical audiences, justify inherently divisive tactics, and use violence as a rhetorical strategy. Institutions and countermovements have a variety of strategies for resistance.

Influence: Science and Practice is an examination of the psychology of compliance (i.e. uncovering which factors cause a person to say "yes" to another's request) and is written in a narrative style combined with scholarly research. Cialdini combines evidence from experimental work with the techniques and strategies he gathered while working as a salesperson, fundraiser, advertiser, and other positions, inside organizations that commonly use compliance tactics to get us to say "yes". Widely used in graduate and undergraduate psychology and management classes, as well as sold to people operating successfully in the business world, the eagerly awaited revision of Influence reminds the reader of the power of persuasion. Cialdini organizes compliance techniques into six categories based on psychological principles that direct human behavior: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

How to persuade citizens to enlist? How to convince them to fight in a war which was, for many, distant in terms of kilometres as well as interest? Modern persuasion techniques, both political and commercial, were used to motivate enlistment and financial support to build a "factory of consensus". The propagandists manipulated the public, guiding their thoughts and actions according to the wishes of those in power and were therefore the forerunners of spin doctors and marketing and advertising professionals. Their posters caught the attention of members of the public with images of children and beautiful women, involving them, nourishing their inner needs for well-being and social prestige, motivating them by showing them testimonials in amusing and adventurous situations, and inspiring their way of perceiving the enemy and the war itself, whose objective was to "make the world safe for democracy". In the discourse of this strategy we find storytelling, humour, satire and fear, but also the language of gestures, recognized as important for the completeness of messages. Were the propagandists "hidden persuaders" who knew the characteristics of the human mind? We do not know for certain. However, their posters have a personal and consistent motivation which this book intends to demonstrate.

Discusses philosophers Mencius and Aristotle as socio-ecological thinkers.

Mencius (385–303/302 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) were contemporaries, but are often understood to represent opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum. Mencius is associated with the ecological, emergent, flowing, and connected; Artistotle with the rational, static, abstract, and binary. Douglas Robinson argues that in their conceptions of rhetoric, at least, Mencius and Aristotle are much more similar than different: both are powerfully socio-ecological, espousing and exploring collectivist thinking about the circulation of energy and social value through groups. The agent performing the actions of pistis, “persuading-and-being-persuaded,” in Aristotle and zhi, “governing-and-being-governed,” in Mencius is, Robinson demonstrates, not so much the rhetor as an individual as it is the whole group. Robinson tracks this collectivistic thinking through a series of comparative considerations using a theory that draws impetus from Arne Naess’s “ecosophical” deep ecology and from work on rhetoric powered by affective ecologies, but with details of the theory drawn equally from Mencius and Aristotle.