By Cristo Leon, Ph.D.Last reviewed: August 24, 2026
A good idea does not move by itself.
A researcher may have strong evidence. An entrepreneur may have an innovative product. A manager may have a sound plan. A faculty member may have developed a valuable program. A student may have completed excellent work.
In every case, however, another person must eventually decide to listen, understand, trust, support, approve, fund, adopt, or act.
That is where influence, persuasion, and pitching become essential communication competencies.
The three terms are closely related, but they are not interchangeable:
Influence creates the conditions for change. Persuasion creates movement toward change. Pitching concentrates that effort around a decision.
Understanding these distinctions is important not only for becoming a more effective communicator, but also for recognizing the ethical responsibilities that come with attempting to influence others.
Influence Begins Before You Make the Ask
Influence is the broadest of the three concepts.
We influence others through our expertise, credibility, reputation, relationships, language, behavior, and previous interactions. Much of that influence develops before we ever explicitly ask someone to agree with us or take action.
Imagine a research team considering a new project. Before anyone formally proposes a direction, team members already have impressions about one another:
Who understands the problem?
Who reliably follows through?
Who listens?
Who contributes useful information?
Whose judgment has proved dependable?
Who acknowledges when they do not know something?
Those accumulated interactions establish credibility and shape how future messages will be interpreted.
Influence, therefore, is partly relational. It develops through repeated communication and establishes the conditions under which people become willing—or unwilling—to consider what we have to say.
This is particularly important in professional and academic environments. Communication rarely begins when we start a presentation. Audiences interpret our arguments through what they already know about us, our organizations, our disciplines, and the issue under discussion.
Before someone evaluates the argument, they are often already evaluating the communicator.
Persuasion Moves Communication Toward Choice
Persuasion is more deliberate.
Communication becomes persuasive when the objective is not simply to transmit information but to influence how another person understands an issue, evaluates alternatives, forms an attitude, or makes a decision (Goldstein, 2009).
Persuasion appears throughout academic, professional, civic, and personal communication.
A researcher argues that a problem deserves investigation.
A principal investigator explains why a proposed methodology is appropriate.
A faculty member advocates for a new academic program.
A manager recommends changing an organizational process.
A nonprofit asks a donor to support an initiative.
An employee proposes a new approach to a supervisor.
A job candidate explains why their expertise fits a position.
In each situation, information matters. But information alone is not the objective.
The communicator wants someone else to arrive at a judgment.
Persuasion is therefore one of the principal mechanisms through which ideas become decisions and decisions become action.
Importantly, persuasion should not be confused with coercion. Persuasive communication attempts to influence another person while still preserving that person’s ability to evaluate the message and make a choice (O’Keefe, 2002; Perloff, 2015).
That distinction is fundamental to ethical communication.
Aristotle Still Matters: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos
More than two thousand years after Aristotle’s (fourth century BCE/1996) Rhetoric, ethos, logos, and pathos remain useful for understanding persuasive communication.
They are sometimes introduced as three techniques that speakers can use to make an argument persuasive. I find it more useful to think of them as three questions an audience is continually asking.
Ethos: Why should I trust you?
Ethos concerns credibility.
Does the communicator understand the subject?
Are they prepared?
Do they represent the evidence fairly?
Do they acknowledge limitations?
Do their actions correspond with what they are asking others to believe?
Expertise contributes to ethos, but credentials alone do not create credibility. Trust also develops through transparency, preparation, consistency, fairness, and respect for the audience.
Logos: Why does this make sense?
Logos concerns reasoning.
What evidence supports the claim?
Does the conclusion follow from the information presented?
What assumptions are being made?
Were reasonable alternatives considered?
What happens if the recommendation is adopted?
What happens if nothing changes?
A persuasive argument should allow an audience to understand not only what the communicator recommends but why the recommendation follows from the available evidence.
Pathos: Why should I care?
Pathos concerns human significance.
Why does the problem matter?
Who is affected?
What is at stake?
What changes if we act—or fail to act?
Emotional relevance is not inherently opposed to evidence. Most consequential decisions have human implications. The ethical question is whether emotional appeals illuminate those implications or distort them.
Research continues to examine the ways persuasive communication integrates credibility, reasoning, linguistic choices, audience expectations, and emotional relevance (Bade, 2009; Barr, 2021; Liu & Zhang, 2021; Nagib Callaos & Bekis Callaos, 2014).
Effective persuasion typically requires some combination of all three dimensions.
Evidence without credibility may be questioned.
Credibility without reasoning may produce trust without understanding.
Logic without significance may be accurate but fail to provide an audience with a reason to care.
Persuasion Is Audience-Centered
One of the easiest mistakes to make when preparing an argument is to begin with:
What do I want to say?
A more useful question is:
What does this audience need in order to understand and evaluate my idea?
The difference is significant.
Experts naturally organize information according to the structure of their field (Boster & Carpenter, 2020). Audiences, however, often organize information around the problem they are trying to solve.
A researcher may want to discuss methodology.
A funding agency may first want to understand significance and feasibility.
An engineer may want to explain how a system functions.
An executive may first want to know whether it will reduce cost, improve performance, or mitigate risk.
A faculty member may want to describe the intellectual merits of a curriculum.
Students may first want to know how it changes their learning experience.
Effective communication requires building a bridge between these perspectives.
Research on personalized persuasion similarly suggests that persuasive effectiveness can depend on how well messages, sources, and contexts align with characteristics of the intended receiver (Teeny et al., 2021).
Audience adaptation does not mean telling people whatever they want to hear.
It means understanding their knowledge, goals, concerns, constraints, values, and decision criteria well enough to explain why an idea is relevant to them.
Audiences Know When You Are Trying to Persuade Them
People are not passive recipients of persuasive communication.
They develop what researchers describe as persuasion knowledge: an awareness that another person or organization is attempting to influence them.
Once people recognize persuasive intent, they may begin evaluating not only the argument but also the motives and strategies of the communicator.
Eisend and Tarrahi’s (2022) meta-analysis of persuasion knowledge in marketplace contexts demonstrates the importance of these processes for understanding how audiences respond to persuasive attempts.
This has a major implication for professional communication:
Persuasive technique cannot substitute for trust.
Artificial urgency, exaggerated claims, hidden motives, unsupported certainty, or manipulative emotional appeals may create resistance rather than agreement.
A sophisticated audience is not only asking:
Is this argument convincing?
They may also be asking:
Why is this person trying to convince me?
Ethical persuasion should withstand both questions.
Pitching Is Persuasion Under Constraint
A pitch is a concentrated form of persuasive communication.
It has a purpose, an audience, and usually a constraint:
limited time, limited attention, limited information—or all three.
A pitch might last thirty seconds during an unexpected encounter, three minutes during a competition, ten minutes before investors, fifteen minutes before administrators, or twenty minutes during a research presentation.
The duration changes.
The fundamental communication challenge does not.
A pitch must compress an idea without destroying its meaning.
This is why a pitch is not simply a shorter presentation.
A presentation can explain a subject.
A pitch must help an audience decide what to do with it.
Five Questions Every Effective Pitch Should Answer
The exact structure will vary by context, but most effective pitches answer five fundamental questions.
1. Why should I care?
Establish the problem, opportunity, need, or significance.
Do not make the audience wait until the end to discover why the subject matters.
2. What are you proposing?
State the central idea clearly.
If the audience cannot explain your proposal after hearing it, additional information will probably not rescue the pitch.
3. Why should I believe you?
Provide sufficient evidence.
Demonstrate expertise.
Acknowledge uncertainty where appropriate.
Establish why the proposal is credible.
4. Why does this matter to this audience?
Connect the idea with the priorities, constraints, needs, or decision criteria of the people listening.
This is where audience analysis becomes visible.
5. What do you want to happen next?
Make the ask explicit.
Do you want approval?
Funding?
A meeting?
A collaboration?
Feedback?
Permission to proceed?
Adoption of a recommendation?
A pitch without a clear next step is frequently just a short presentation.
You Are Probably Pitching More Often Than You Think
The word pitch is often associated with entrepreneurs presenting businesses to investors.
That is only one form of pitching.
Researchers pitch projects to collaborators.
Investigators pitch research questions through grant proposals.
Faculty pitch new courses and programs.
Authors pitch manuscripts, arguments, and book concepts to editors.
Employees pitch solutions to supervisors.
Managers pitch strategies to teams.
Candidates pitch their expertise during interviews.
Students pitch projects, research findings, and themselves.
Even an academic abstract functions as a type of pitch.
Within a few hundred words, an author must establish that:
the problem matters;
the approach is credible;
something significant was discovered;
and the work deserves additional attention.
The context may shift from business to science, but the underlying communication problem remains similar:
Why should another person invest scarce attention, time, credibility, or resources in this idea?
Researchers Also Need to Persuade
Academics sometimes treat persuasion as something that belongs primarily to advertising, politics, marketing, or sales.
Research provides a useful counterexample.
A grant proposal is persuasive.
A journal article is persuasive.
A conference presentation is persuasive.
A literature review is persuasive.
Even methodological writing contains persuasive elements.
Researchers continually make arguments about:
what problems deserve attention;
which literature matters;
how concepts should be defined;
which methods are appropriate;
how evidence should be interpreted;
and what conclusions can reasonably be drawn.
The expectation of evidence does not eliminate persuasion. It establishes standards for how persuasion should occur.
Academic persuasion should be based on transparent reasoning, appropriate evidence, methodological credibility, acknowledgment of limitations, and openness to critique.
The goal is not simply to make an argument difficult to challenge.
The goal is to construct an argument worth challenging.
The Most Dangerous Person You May Persuade Is Yourself
Persuasion also has a reflexive dimension.
The act of developing and defending an argument can change how strongly we believe it ourselves.
Schwardmann (2022), using field experiments associated with international debating competitions, examined this phenomenon as self-persuasion. Participants assigned to argue particular positions subsequently demonstrated stronger beliefs consistent with positions they had been asked to defend.
The implication extends beyond debating.
Researchers repeatedly defend theoretical positions.
Managers repeatedly advocate for strategies.
Entrepreneurs repeatedly pitch their companies.
Faculty repeatedly justify programs.
Over time, the ability to defend an idea can become confused with evidence that the idea must be correct.
This is precisely why persuasion should remain connected to critique.
We should become skilled enough to explain and defend our ideas while remaining intellectually flexible enough to revise or abandon them when better evidence emerges.
Persuasion should not eliminate critique. It should survive critique.
Influence Without Manipulation
Influence and persuasion sometimes acquire negative connotations because both can be used manipulatively.
The relevant distinction is not whether communication attempts to affect another person’s decision.
Much meaningful communication does.
The more important questions concern how influence is exercised.
Does the audience retain meaningful choice?
Are important facts being intentionally concealed?
Are uncertainties acknowledged?
Are competing alternatives represented fairly?
Are emotional appeals proportional to the issue?
Can claims withstand scrutiny?
Can the audience question the communicator?
Would the argument remain defensible if the persuasive strategy were made completely visible?
Ethical persuasion respects the agency of the audience.
The objective should not be to defeat another person’s capacity for judgment.
The objective is to provide that judgment with the strongest legitimate reasons to consider your position.
This distinction becomes increasingly important as organizations use sophisticated communication technologies, personalized messaging, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and automated forms of persuasion.
Greater persuasive capacity should produce greater ethical responsibility.
Ten Videos for Developing Persuasive Communication
For readers who want to explore influence, persuasion, rhetoric, presentation, and pitching through shorter resources, the following videos provide useful starting points.
1. Science of Persuasion — Robert Cialdini (Team Cialdini, 2012)
A concise introduction to several principles associated with influence and persuasive behavior.
2. How to Use Rhetoric to Get What You Want — Camille Langston (2016)
A useful introduction to rhetorical communication and the continuing relevance of ethos, logos, and pathos.
3. How to Win an Argument — Neal Katyal (2020)
A discussion of persuasive argument that emphasizes listening, audience understanding, credibility, and human connection.
4. The Secret Structure of Great Talks — Nancy Duarte (2011)
A valuable resource for understanding how presentations can construct movement between an existing situation and a desired future.
5. TED’s Secret to Great Public Speaking — Chris Anderson (2016)
A concise discussion of communicating ideas in ways that allow them to move from the speaker to an audience.
6. How to Speak So That People Want to Listen — Julian Treasure (2014)
A practical exploration of vocal delivery, speaking habits, credibility, and audience engagement.
7. How to Pitch Your Best Ideas — Adam Grant (2022)
A useful discussion of pitching as a professional communication competency rather than something limited to entrepreneurship.
8. How to Pitch Your Startup — Kevin Hale (2019)
Although developed for startup environments, its emphasis on clarity, concision, and audience understanding applies across professional contexts.
9. How to Pitch to a VC — David S. Rose (2007)
A practical examination of preparation, credibility, expertise, passion, and the relationship between the communicator and the proposal.
10. Talk Nerdy to Me — Melissa Marshall (2012)
Particularly relevant for scientists, researchers, engineers, and technical experts who need to communicate complex information to audiences outside their specialization.
These videos should be treated as entry points rather than substitutes for the substantial scholarly literature on persuasion. The research tradition surrounding persuasion spans rhetoric, communication studies, psychology, marketing, discourse analysis, education, and other fields (Barnett & Boster, 1997; Dillard & Pfau, 2002; Dillard & Shen, 2013; Knowles & Linn, 2004; O’Keefe, 2002; Perloff, 2015)
From Having an Idea to Moving an Idea
We often invest enormous effort in developing ideas and comparatively little effort in learning how to communicate their value.
That imbalance matters.
Evidence is essential, but evidence must be interpreted.
Expertise is valuable, but expertise must become credible to someone else.
Innovation matters, but someone must understand why the innovation is worth adopting.
A strong argument matters, but someone must care enough to evaluate it.
A proposal matters only when another person understands what is being proposed and what should happen next.
That is the relationship among influence, persuasion, and pitching.
Influence establishes the conditions under which people are willing to listen. Persuasion gives them reasons to reconsider what they think or do. Pitching brings those elements together when a decision must be made. – Cristo LEon 2024.
The objective is not simply to become better at getting what we want.
It is to become better at making worthwhile ideas understandable, credible, relevant, and actionable.
That is one of the central responsibilities of effective communication.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between influence, persuasion, and pitching?
Influence is the broad process through which credibility, relationships, communication, and behavior affect how others perceive us and our ideas. Persuasion is a deliberate attempt to shape how another person understands or evaluates an issue while preserving their ability to choose. Pitching is a compressed form of persuasive communication typically organized around a specific opportunity, proposal, or decision.
Why are ethos, logos, and pathos still important?
They represent three enduring dimensions of persuasive communication: credibility, reasoning, and significance. Audiences need reasons to trust the communicator, reasons to believe the argument makes sense, and reasons to care about its implications.
What makes persuasion ethical?
Ethical persuasion respects audience autonomy, represents evidence responsibly, acknowledges relevant uncertainty, avoids deliberate deception, and allows claims to be questioned.
What makes a good pitch?
A strong pitch establishes why the issue matters, clearly identifies the proposed idea, provides enough evidence to establish credibility, connects the proposal to the audience’s priorities, and ends with a clear next step.
Is pitching only relevant to business?
No. Researchers, faculty, students, managers, nonprofit leaders, professionals, and job applicants all routinely pitch ideas. Grant proposals, academic abstracts, research presentations, program proposals, and interviews all contain elements of pitching.
Publication
These ideas were foundational to my discussion with Dr James M. Lipuma and Marcos Cabobianco to write the paper:
Trans-Disciplinary Communication and Persuasion in Convergence Research Approach (León et al., 2024)
Selected References
Anderson, C. (2016, March 1). TED’s secret to great public speaking [Video recording]. https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_ted_s_secret_to_great_public_speaking
Aristotele. (1996). Retorica (1st, Original del siglo IV a.C. eds.). (Original work published fourth century BCE)
Bade, D. (2009). Ethos, Logos, Pathos or Sender, Message, Receiver?: A Problematological Rhetoric for Information Technologies. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 47(7), 612–630. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639370903111981
Barnett, G. A., & Boster, F. J. (1997). Advances in persuasion. Ablex Pub. Corp.
Barr, T. (2021). A Rule That Bends: Aristotle on Pathos and Equity. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 54(2), 149–170. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.54.2.0149
Boster, F. J., & Carpenter, C. J. (2020). Critical Questions in Persuasion Research. Cognella, Inc.
Dillard, J. P., & Pfau, M. (2002). The persuasion handbook: Developments in theory and practice. Sage Publications.
Dillard, J. P., & Shen, L. (2013). The SAGE handbook of persuasion: Developments in theory and practice (2nd ed.). SAGE.
Duarte, N. (2011, November 1). The secret structure of great talks [Video recording]. https://www.ted.com/talks/nancy_duarte_the_secret_structure_of_great_talks
Eisend, M., & Tarrahi, F. (2022). Persuasion Knowledge in the Marketplace: A Meta‐Analysis. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 32(1), 3–22. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1258
Goldstein, N. J. (with Martin, S. J., Cialdini, R. B., & Books24x7, I.). (2009). Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion (eBook ed.). Profile Books.
Grant, A. (2022, April 1). WorkLife with Adam Grant: How To Pitch Your Best Ideas [Video recording]. https://www.ted.com/talks/worklife_with_adam_grant_how_to_pitch_your_best_ideas
Hale, K. (2019, September 13). Kevin Hale—How to Pitch Your Startup [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17XZGUX_9iM
Katyal, N. (2020, July 1). How to win an argument (at the US Supreme Court, or anywhere) [Video recording]. https://www.ted.com/talks/neal_katyal_how_to_win_an_argument_at_the_us_supreme_court_or_anywhere
Knowles, E. S., & Linn, J. A. (2004). Resistance and persuasion. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Langston, C. (2016, September 1). How to use rhetoric to get what you want [Video recording]. https://www.ted.com/talks/camille_langston_how_to_use_rhetoric_to_get_what_you_want
León, C., Lipuma, J., Cabobianco, M. O., & Meritano-Corrales, E. (2024). Trans-Disciplinary Communication and Persuasion in Convergence Research Approach. International Journal of Human Sciences Research, 4(10), 1–20. /Research/Collaboration & Convergence (CLDM_Ds_Peer-reviewed). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.22533/at.ed.5584102414036
Liu, S., & Zhang, J. (2021). Using Metadiscourse to Enhance Persuasiveness in Corporate Press Releases: A Corpus-Based Study. SAGE Open, 11(3), 215824402110321. https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440211032165
Marshall, M. (2012, June 1). Talk nerdy to me [Video recording]. https://www.ted.com/talks/melissa_marshall_talk_nerdy_to_me
Nagib Callaos & Bekis Callaos. (2014). Academic Ethos, Pathos, and Logos. Research Ethos. Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, 12(5), 76–95.
O’Keefe, D. J. (2002). Persuasion: Theory & research (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
Perloff, R. M. (2015). The Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and Attitudes in the Twenty-First Century. (5th ed.). Taylor & Francis Group.
Rose, D. S. (2007, March 1). How to pitch to a VC [Video recording]. https://www.ted.com/talks/david_s_rose_how_to_pitch_to_a_vc
Schwardmann, P. (2022). Self-persuasion: Evidence from field experiments at international debating competitions. 112(4), 1118–1146. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20200372
Team Cialdini. (2012, November 26). Science of Persuasion [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFdCzN7RYbw
Teeny, J. D., Siev, J. J., Briñol, P., Petty, R. E., & Lee, A. (2021). A Review and Conceptual Framework for Understanding Personalized Matching Effects in Persuasion. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 31(2), 382–414. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1198
Treasure, J. (2014, June 27). How to Speak So That People Want to Listen [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIho2S0ZahI