Persuasive

May 29th, 2013
Course code: 7308
Dr. Sharon Avital

Student: 000776790

Theories of Persuasion
Writing Assignment

Hello, my name is Santos Serfaty and I am a recruiting officer representing the LOST (Learn on Saturdays too) Collective, and together we are devoted to restructure the undergraduate curriculum so that the students must attend six days a week, between 4 to 6 hours a day to the IDC. As a current student at the IDC school of Communications I strongly believe that memory is set best if you go over the material more frequently.

There is no doubt that the brain will achieve its best when the student is practicing every day. Here is a specific and short case of a student that learns 3 days a week; at the beginning of each week, the student is not able to remember what he/she studied a week before due to the long period of time between classes. Hereby we came to the conclusion that the student should plan to spend 6 days a week studying for each subject every week of the semester. Three days a week or less, means you have more days every week to accidentally forget the material you are trying to learn. However all students should study more that the bare minimum 4 days/week and 4 hours/week, for each 3 hours subject, yet that is for a high school student, a college or university related major will need to start at the far end of the study formula 6days /week and 6 days hours/week) to improve and get better results in the exams.

We the LOST offices want to give you full responsibility and the proper tools for the exams and your studies. Thus you can see only positive outcomes and success for you,"The Students". Most people report college is harder than high school. Statistically, only 30% of college freshmen graduate after being in school for 6 years, due to the lack of rehearsing the material and the days of school.
If you are a full time student and put in less time each week for college than you did in high school (going to class, doing homework, and studying), then your behavior is saying college is easier than high school. However If you can make at least the same commitment you did in high school (6 to 7 days a week ) then you will be on a better path to success.

How would you feel in front of you parents or friends when you come back from the IDC, with 3 days a week schedule "easy life", and you have a disgusting grade that does not show any progress of yourself as student and or person?. Despite of what you say or do, you will never have a fair answer to them. Many students around the world such a Japan study 6 days a week and one might notice how that civilization is a completely success in progress. We the IDC will give you, as previous mentioned all the tools you need; No one says studying 6 days a week is easy however as Carter G Woodson said "The mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things the effort must result in making a man think and do for himself". We won't make you a machine; we will shape you into a better student and human with the 6 days program.

Furthermore believe it or not most of you college students study 6 days a week and actually go to college to keep studying in their free time. Ironically must of those students "do not study too much at home" and they still get an amazing grade, how is that even possible? That’s probable since the human brain contains a capacity range from 1 to 1000 terabytes! In fact the brain has bigger storage than a computer, did you know that? Rehearsing the material every day or at least 6 days a week will not only enable you to remember and make the proper connections and assimilations of all the relevant material, but at the end of the day you will have to do less effort on the exams to recall all the material that many of your fellow students summon up, without any single problem just for the fact that they do like to study 6 days a week.

Look at the bigger picture; if you are spending less than 30 hours a week on college work, it is very likely that you are falling behind. Keep in mind that most of your classes will have your teacher spending about 3 hours per week presenting new material. If it takes your teacher about 3 hours each week just to present the new information, it should take you longer to master the new material. Someone as successful as your teacher will ask you if you are able to study 6 days a week, what you would say about it. Taking into consideration that you professor is a credible person and probably study 7 days a week and more hours per day and he/she manage to keep the pace and remember everything including the material, presentations, explanations, and even your names and last names, what you would say about it?. As mentioned before, look around! See for yourself, many of your friends are in reality studying 6 days a week and look even closer and you will see that many of them are in the wall of honor without too much effort. The five or three day school week was designed so that students would be free on weekends to help with crops and to attend church on Sunday. That's one of the reasons that in the US, students generally have the summer off again, so that they could help with the crops.

The United States is finally beginning to consider other options to the 5 day school week by changing hours, days and curriculum content to even set it as 6 days of school similar to China and Japan. We will give a final advice that we hope you will think about it when choosing whether to be the same basic student or improve yourself studying 6 days a week. Many students due to the fact that they study 3 days a week, lost the motivation of studying and keep moving forward with college, and is not a surprise that they drop out of college and then, they see themselves 10 years from now with no opportunity of going back to those lovely years when the only important thing was studying 6 days or even more, because when you don’t do what is easy than you have to do what's hard. Show up! Strive for better; when you create a repetition it become easy, when something is easy it become a pleasurable, when is pleasurable you want to do it often, when you do it often, you have created and habit. Study 6 days a week as many of your friends do, and you will see for yourself how easy it is to remember and success in every exam like everyone following this program does.

Commentary The first used is Self-Persuasion, suggest that placing people in situations where they are motivated to persuade themselves to change their own attitudes, behavior or lifestyle changes are concerned. This strategy produces more powerful and more long-lasting effects than do direct techniques of persuasion, thus the student not only will agree with the notions of studying 6 days a week but the effect would probably last longer. This is because direct persuasion, members of an audience are constantly aware of the fact that someone is trying to influence them. In a self-persuasion motivation the people is convinced that the change comes from within. The second strategy used is Effort and Attribution theory that refers to the people that search for causes of particular events (Heider 1958; Kelley 1967). While attribution search is more likely following a failure or negative outcome (Folkes 1988), it can also follow a success or positive outcome. Overall, people feel a moral responsibility to use the resources under their control to the fullest. This means that the student will feel all the responsibility for their actions. Hence the best way to show them that studying 6 days a week, is the right choice, one might use a few examples to draw a more understandable picture before them.

Third strategy is according to the principal of perceptual contrast that states that differences are most apparent when extremes are juxtaposed. Thus this is the principle of perceptual contrast by which our senses work. Put light next to dark and it seems lighter (Cialdini. R. 2009). The same effect also applies to more our complex cognitive constructions, instead of comparing why they studied 3 days a week and fewer hours at the beginning at the IDC. I made a comparison with the fact that as it stands, making a point of showing that in other places in the world such as Japan, the students study 6 days a week and by comparing the fact that previous generations also studied 6 days a week or even every day and they didn’t have the option of complaining. The fourth theory I used was the likeability heuristic. (Avital, S. 2013 Liking and Similarity). It states that we trust and are more likely to agree with someone we like, regardless of the message. I used this theory by making the connection between students just like the rest of us that favor the notion of studying 6 days a week with the hope that other students that like or are friends with students that want to just study 3 days a week will change their opinions and agree with their equivalent undergraduates.

Following the likeability heuristic I took advantage of the authority heuristic. (Avital, S. 2013 Authority). 5th technique; the authority heuristic says that we comply and agree with authoritative sources regardless of what they say. Since the teachers tend to be viewed as intelligent person, successful, respected authority figures, we took advantage of that image to say that hypothetically, if the teacher would ask their students to study 6 days a week for 6 hours a day, the mere authoritative status in this case would cause the students to understand from a different point of view "A more credible view". And that take us to the 6th and last technique the norm of conformity that states: “do as others around are doing unless you are confident you should do otherwise.” (Avital, S. 2013 Conformity). By convincing a few students to study 6 days a week and attend to class between 4 to 6 hours every day, We the LOST offices, hope that students around them will follow their actions and take the same path to success and hopefully get better grades as well, once they see the other students doing the same.