This most recent week was eventful in class. There was a massive amount of material covered, combined with the speaker. All that said, I found most of it intuitive and expected. I really wish we would have talked about one point a bit longer though. How a person can use language to tailor their message to differing audiences? Here's an example of what I mean:
The club which I help run is hosting a controversial speaker in 2 weeks. He'll be talking of the virtues of a purely free market health care system. This event is targeted at a number of groups, rather than our bread-and-butter constituency of the DC Forum For Freedom. The targeted groups include: students, professors and staff of the SPA, Democrats, Republicans, community members, press, and other smaller groups. Clearly, each of these groups comes from a differing background and would have a differing motive to come to the event. Because they have differing motivations, a group would want to target each group with differing language. How does anyone do that? It seems complicated, and time consuming.
No, not with a little thought into the motivations of each group and some background in what we learned today. AUSFL is gifted to have a number of members who have either taken Cross Cultural Communication or have backgrounds in marketing(which draws heavily from it). We have a basic game plan to bring out each of the targeted groups. First, to bring out the SPA, we'll call the event a great place to direct students for class projects. We'll also use a more formal language in the communication, playing on our position as the best-led political organization on campus. This language allows for the high-context respect factor to take more of a role, leading to a greater likelihood for the professors to recommend the event.
Democrats and Republicans will get similar but different treatment in the field of language. We'll attempt to play upon each group's emotions with controversial wording, hoping to stir either anger or fear. Logically, the primary motivation for each group to come out would be to oppose us, and emotion is one of the greatest motivators in this case. This goes double for community members, because it takes even more emotion to have people even walk a block to see a speaker.
The final group will need a 180 in language from the prior 3. When addressing the press a group wants to be as low context, detail oriented as possible in their language. We'll want to lay out each and every detail, including contact information and how to get to campus were they to want to cover the event. This will be the first event where we'll be actively engaging the press, so some trial and error will be inevitable.
This ends my case study in the way I'll be using language to tailor a single message to many groups.
Nick
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The question that I have to ask when it comes to using language to persuade people of your viewpoint is how to use the same language to convince people in opposing groups to see things the same way. I don't believe it's possible to use the same rhetoric with dissenting groups to induce them to agree.
ReplyDeleteOne solution to this problem is to separate the groups and talk to each of them using different language appealing to their preconceived beliefs. By speaking to each group with different strategies you may be able to convince them all to agree with you.
Another solution might be to speak about the issue in a very neutral way to avoid angering anyone you are attempting to sway. The problem with this solution is of course that no one will be energized by or passionate about the speech.
As I see it, it is almost impossible to reconcile everybody to one conclusive agreement, no matter how eloquent or persuasive your language may be. In the end, I think that language has its limits.