“I’ll Buy That”
Writing a persuasive piece involves more
than just telling your side of the story. The art of persuasion involves
changing another person’s point of view, allowing them to walk in your shoes by
way of your words, think beyond their own life experiences and draw a different
big-picture conclusion based on their intellectual experience.
Often, writers believe that a narrative that
has either a happy or a sad ending will persuade a reader toward one side of an
issue or another. The problem is, anecdotal evidence alone doesn’t carry a lot
of weight. For example, imagine walking into a “big box” store two days after
Thanksgiving looking for a blue plastic widget. You have a headache, and have
spent the past hour snapping at your loving and loyal significant other. The
store is packed from the doorway all the way back to plumbing fixtures, and you
are impeded in your negotiation of the aisles at every turn. You discover the
store has no blue widgets in stock. If this were your only experience shopping
at this store, you would conclude that the store isn’t very well stocked,
doesn’t have enough help to serve customers effectively and everyone there is
grumpy anyway. Your experience may be true but it is unique, based on the
situation and circumstances surrounding it. It would not persuade 200,000 other
shoppers who made trips to the same store during less hectic times that the
conditions you described were the norm.
The primary factor in writing persuasive
pieces is that there is a clear focus, purpose and destination for the
piece. Your purpose is to engage both
the mind and the heart of your reader and shape their opinion. You must,
therefore, have a clear-cut opinion yourself. Otherwise, the piece will drift
from one shore to another, touching on truths along the way, but never making a
point.
Good persuasive pieces begin with a series
of general statements, and back each up with at least one piece of solid
evidence. Anecdotes are fine, but research plus anecdotes are even better. For
instance, an exercise I gave to prospective employees was to write one or two
paragraphs about a pet they had owned that would persuade me that the breed or
animal was one I should consider. Out of twenty people, two were able to make a
case. The others made general statements such as, “The poodle is the second
most intelligent dog there is,” but offered me no examples of its intelligence,
what dog intelligence looks like and why it’s important to pet owners, or even
what breed was more intelligent and why it would not be a better choice for a
pet, rather than a poodle. A good
persuasive piece backs up statements with specifics, and leaves the reader no
doubt of the veracity of the statement.
One of the best written pieces on the topic made the claim that “pugs,
despite their appearance, are the best pets,” then went on to cite AKC
references on the breed and detailed her personal experience with raising,
training and living with a pug. Even though I am a cat person, I found myself
thinking about getting a pug when my supply of cats runs out.
Persuasive pieces don’t use hammers when
scalpels will do. Read the editorial page of any local newspaper, and you’ll
see examples of writing in which the writers seem to be screeching. A rant is
not persuasive, but rather it is annoying. It also makes the writer appear to
be deranged, leading to a loss of credibility that ultimately derails the
argument presented. Well-written persuasive pieces shave away the opposition’s
argument layer by layer, allowing the reader to mentally masticate each idea
with the same deliberateness they would use in engulfing a rack of barbecued
ribs one sliver at a time.
Finally,
persuasive pieces acknowledge any truth in the opposition’s point of view, but
then turn that truth on its head in order to win the point. For example, one
particularly ardent pro-life conservative speaker used the occasion of Black History
Month to acknowledge that racism still exists in the United States, but then
turned the focus of that statement toward left-leaning organizations such as
Planned Parenthood and the political parties who support abortion on demand
when he pointed out that a higher percentage of black babies than white babies are
terminated, leading one to believe that abortion is a form of institutionalized
genocide and those who support abortion are inherently racist. He also harkened
back in history to Margaret Sanger’s affiliation with what was termed “The
Negro Project,” which was South Carolina’s effort to sterilize the majority of
adult black males, an attempt perpetrated during the 1930s as a means of keeping
the welfare roles low. As this gentleman has a large following of
African-Americans, I wonder how many of them will rethink their support of the
openly pro-choice candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, during this
election cycle.
Good
persuasive writing wins wars, solves problems and can change the world, so whether
you are writing a letter to the editor, penning a letter of complaint to a
corporate leader, or promoting your latest book in a marketing piece, following
these tips for persuasive writing will give your essay the extra push that may
nudge an otherwise reluctant reader to do see things from your point of view,
and act accordingly.