This website is funded by the Teaching Development Grants (TDG) from the Centre for Holistic Teaching and Learning (CHTL) of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) together with much support from the Department of Communication Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. It is designed to augment established learning materials for a university core course UCPN1005 The Art of Persuasion. This course not only aims to enhance our undergraduate students' general public speaking skills, but also focuses specifically on persuasive skills, strategies, and principles in speech communication. The website contains seven units with six videos produced by our students and some useful learning resources from selected external sites. We trust it will help students obtain greater motivation and understanding of relevant theories, concepts, and their applications.

UCPN1005 The Art of Persuasion course was developed from a former General Education course GCPS1005 Public Speaking. The Public Speaking programme was first founded by Professor John H. Powers from the Department of Communication Studies in 2013. He and his team devoted considerable time and effort to ensure the course remained responsive to student needs. Since its inception, the Public Speaking course has been revamped a number of times to reflect these evolving needs. The course entitled "The Art of Persuasion" has become a university core course for all undergraduate students since 2019.

Successful public speaking is not simply the delivery of information in a given period of time. It requires a specific skill set that is usually hard-won by persistent practice. One of the most fundamental of these skills is to "know your audience" which will then enable you to choose appropriate language and content and accurately anticipate how these will be received. If your aim is to persuade your audience of a particular opinion, this is crucial to your success. In addition, you will need to be able to organise your argument in logical sequence and present evidence to support it. This evidence may be of a qualitative or quantitative nature.

Finally, you have probably all witnessed a speaker who was able to respond to questions from his/her audience in an impressive manner. The ability to do this well depends partly on the ability to anticipate some of these questions, but also on what is sometimes referred to as the skill of 'immediacy'. The skill of immediacy requires the speakers to manage their emotional response to an unanticipated and challenging question, and thus be able to think clearly "on the spot" and respond confidently.

The Art of Persuasion course aims to equip students with this skill set. The course comprises spoken and written assessments and allows students the opportunity to consolidate what they have learned from the course. This in turn enables students to confidently persuade future audiences to their way of thinking on any given topic.