Chapter 8: Accommodating Your Audience: Treating Differing Views Objectives

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

An important part of the process of creating an argument is considering your audience's perspective on your issue and determining how to treat alternative views. This chapter will give you an array of strategies to employ to relate to audiences who hold differing degrees of resistant views. In this chapter, you will learn to:

• determine whether your audience is supportive, neutral, or hostile, whether you are considering one audience or multiple audiences, and which audience you will address most directly
  
  
• use a one-sided argument to move a consenting audience from belief to action
  
  
• use multisided argument that responds to possible objections to reach neutral or resistant audiences
  
  
• use the strategy of a classical argument to appeal to neutral or undecided audiences
  
  
• respond to opposing views by summarizing them fairly
  
  
• respond to opposing views by refuting them or conceding to them
  
  
• enlist these specific rebuttal strategies: denying the truth of data; citing counterexamples; casting doubt on the representativeness or sufficiency of examples; casting doubt on the relevance or recency of evidence; questioning the credibility of an authority, the accuracy or context of quotations, the gathering or interpretation of statistical data
  
  
• concede to valid opposing views but shift to your own field of values
  
  
• employ a delayed thesis to reach highly resistant audiences
  
  
• use Rogerian argument to reach highly resistant audiences by showing your reasonableness, emphasizing shared values and points of agreement, and melting down hostility
  
  
• use humor to build bridges to and soften up resistant audiences