Exam 8: Communicating Persuasively

Your company has just adopted a policy of tracking employee emails to determine which employee is leaking confidential information. Because you know that this policy will be unpopular with company employees, which is the best strategy for announcing the policy to employees in a memorandum?

Chapter 8 discusses the four broad goals of an audience. One is security. Name one of the other three goals.

Ethical constraints arise from applicable laws on labor practices, environmental issues, fair trade, consumer rights, and so forth.

What type of argument restates the main point without presenting any evidence to support it?

In the following excerpt, a writer tries to persuade his supervisor to respond to a government request for proposals (RFP) to build an unmanned surveillance plane for the military. Which aspect of the paragraph undercuts the effectiveness of the passage? I think we are making a serious mistake by not responding. If we don't respond to this proposal, we will lose our competitive edge. At a conference last month, for example, I spoke to a couple of people who said the market for unmanned surveillance aircraft will grow exponentially during the next 10 years. Can we talk about this more at next week's planning meeting?

In the following excerpt from a proposal seeking funding to upgrade a police department's crime lab, which of the techniques listed below for making a persuasive case does the writer use? In the past four years, the department's crime lab has experienced an increase in fingerprint evidence for comparisons. The increase in volume is a result of submissions from other rural agencies in the state. However, because our agency cannot access data maintained within the state's Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), submissions are limited to manual searches of the files maintained by our department. You can imagine the likelihood of missing a fingerprint match while looking through thousands of fingerprints by hand. In fact, Harlan Andrews, a Senior Investigator at the Federal Bureau of Investigation's laboratory, reports that manual searches often fail to find matches when in fact fingerprint matches exist. To prevent such errors, our department needs to upgrade its computer system to allow access to AFIS.

Which of the following is NOT a category of constraints on your ability to be persuasive in a workplace document?

According to Chapter 8, crafting a persuasive argument involves seven tasks. One is using the right kinds of evidence. What is another of the tasks listed in the chapter?

Which statement best exemplifies a modest persona?

It is acceptable to manipulate photographs and videos in order to strengthen your argument.

A post hoc argument claims that because A preceded B, A must have caused B.

Statistics are more persuasive when they are based on a sample of an adequate size.

Chapter 8 lists four characteristics that can help you establish an effective professional persona. One is cooperativeness. Which of the following is NOT one of the other characteristics listed in the chapter?

What type of argument poses only two alternatives when in fact there might be more?

What type of argument states that a claim is valid because many people think it is or act as if it is?

Which of these statements is true?

According to Chapter 8, in most cases the best place to state your claim is at the end of the argument because you may alienate your audience if you state it at the beginning.

How does culture affect the process of persuasion?

People who write proposals are the only technical writers who need to be concerned with persuasion.

A testimonial can be an effective persuasive element.