You could take the most beautiful piece of journalism today, a front-page story that one the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news, and if you read it as a speech, it would bomb.
I don't mean stand up at a podium and recite the thing, word for word. Hire the best stage actor possible from Hollywood or Broadway and give the man a week to memorize the story and practice it. Send that man out there and the story would still bomb, because the structure -- the logos -- is all wrong.
Line by line, there'd be nothing wrong with the story. The facts would be right. There'd be plenty of conflict and drama, and the writing would be top notch.
It's simply the way news stories are built -- using the inverted pyramid -- is bad for anything persuasive.
To persuade, you need a different type of animal. The inverted pyramid is wonderful for news stories because it tells you the most important things right away. Lower down in the piece, it's less and less important.
There are reasons for this. You can't write news stories like novels or movies, which keep the audience guessing until the end. It'd be horrible journalism for a newspaper to run the headline, "Jury reaches verdict in murder case" and not tell the reader whether they found the accused guilty or innocent until the last word of the last sentence in the last paragraph.
Building a speech or an oped, though, means saving the best for last, and not giving it all away in the opening sentence.
You want to structure anything persuasive so that it builds to a climax, inspiring the audience into action with rock-solid logic, stories about real people that make them mad as hell and compelling reasons why this problem is not only fixable, but something worth their time and effort to go out and fix.
This is hard to do, and there are volumes of books written on the subject. It's hard to explain in a short blog post, but here's a few tips:
How far do you take the audience?
It's not the intensity of the emotion that matters -- it's the distance the audience travels.
Maybe you've got three real stories about little kids who died of malnutrition, stories that'll break your heart, and you write a speech that tells each story as part of an appeal to get people to donate to a charity that focuses on Third World malnutrition. That's a noble cause and I'm sure each story would be heart-breaking. But repetition has to have a purpose.
A better choice is to tell two very different stories.
Start the speech by telling the audience about a little girl who died of dysentery before she turned six months old and could have been saved with $1 a day worth of medicine and food.
End the speech by talking about a second child who had the same health problems and was about to die - but who lived, and is now six years old and in school, because a plumber in Cleveland agreed to donate $30 a month to the clinic that treated her.
Hollywood screenwriters have a short-hand for this method. If you're ending low, start high. If you're ending high, start low. In other words, if you want the audience crying at the end of the speech, get them to feel joy or laughter at the beginning of the speech. A bad speech gives the audience doses of the same emotion over and over again.
Use facts and statistics wisely
Some people think that if they spew facts and numbers from a firehose, it will convince the audience. Research says otherwise.
You some need facts and numbers. It's just not the foundation of your case. They help your case. They amplify it, and support it. But statistics and citations alone aren't enough.
Audiences make decisions based on their values. They weigh facts and arguments against each other, and they tend to use numbers and statitics not to make the decision, but to help justify it.
Outline your case to perfect the structure
When you have the full text of a speech or an oped, it's easy to hide a bad structure behind pretty paragraphs.
Outline it.
What's your hook?
What problem are you tackling?
In a few short sentences, what's your case?
Finally, why should average people take time out of their lives to do something about it?
If you can't answer those questions and outline your speech or oped on a single page, in a structure that takes the audience on an emotional journey and has supporting logic and facts to buttress your premise -- then you've got trouble. Start over and perfect the structure before spending hours and hours writing the text.