Please help me with my persuasive Speech!

[Bubbasteve]

Hey all,

I have to perform a 7.5 to 8.5 minute persuasive speech and I chose to persuade my audience to buy an Apple computer...but I need help.

My arguments thus far are:

Design, OS 10.4 Tiger, and reliablity

What I'm asking from you all are tips to make this speech affective and besides apple.com for hardware specs what sources should I use for my mandatory minimum 7 in speech citations.

This project isn't due until the first couple of weeks in April so this isn't technically last minute but I would like to start ASAP on my Keynote (my visual aid)

 

[Abulia]

As with any speech, who is your target audience? Joe Computer User? Soccer Moms? Die-hard programmers? A business? Because your argument needs to be tailored to the audience.

Let's assume it's Joe User. I'd start out by engaging them in what they don't like about their computers. (Not sure if your speech is allowed to be interactive.) Even if you can't ask questions/get a raise of hands, start by empathizing with the audience. "Who's ever lost work with their PC crashing or sat around counting the amount of time in their lives lost staring at the reboot screen? I know I have and that's why I took a hard look at the Macintosh platform..." You see where I'm going with this.

Joe User doesn't know what OS X is so that's not a pro. That's like a car salesmen telling you the car you're looking at has DVD-Audio. Big deal if you don't know what DVD-Audio is or have it. Appeal to their needs/wants/desires.

Ease of use, functionality, styling, security. They don't care about Panther, Tiger, or Leopard.

I'd make any presentation light on content and high on visuals; I prefer people focused on me, not the presentation or reading the bullet points. If they're reading, they're not listening. Or ditch the visual component entirely.

Anyhoo, some suggestions.

 

[cyberddot]

I'm not convinced and can or should help. Your plee isn't persuasive enough!

 

[Lyle]

No additional advice, just a second to what Don M. said: Know your audience. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you skip the hardware specs from Apple's web site, unless you really are addressing an audience of computer geeks who will truly appreciate them.

As a side note, do yourself a favor and do at least a couple of dry runs (i.e. rehearsals) in front of a small group of friends. Ask them to be brutally honest about what works and doesn't work in your presentation.

 

[Bubbasteve]

Thanks for the advice guys!

My target audience are "Joe" computer users.

I was thinking about skipping too many hardware specs accept the Hard Drive size, Memory, and Speed (I'll omit the graphics card, front side bus and all that noise).

 

[ebrodnick11]

Hey. I'm doing a similar persuasive speech on why buy a mac over a PC to same general audience. Do you have your outline or anything that I could use? there so many damn good things about macs I can't figure out how to structure it. Thanks. my email is ebrodnick@comcast.net