Writing the Persuasion Paper
You are about to embark upon a challenge. Everyone has to write a persuasion from time to time...but most people fail to achieve their intentions. Nevertheless, you may one day need to write a letter to a judge, persuading him or her that you deserve custody of a child or consideration in a traffic matter. You may write a letter to a newspaper or magazine, or a post to an internet mailing list, enlisting other people to aid in a cause you feel strongly about. Or it could be simply a letter to Mom and Dad, asking for an increase in your allowance.
Your assignment: Write a persuasion to a
specific audience, asking that audience to
do something it is reasonable to expect them
to do. Don't forget to name your audience at
the beginning of your paper. The length of your paper should
be 1200-1500 words (that's five to six
double-spaced pages).
Before you begin--before you even start to choose a topic, be certain to read through this entire lesson. Otherwise, you run the risk of committing yourself to a topic you may love, but that is impossible to justify in the space you have to work in.
Let's face an unpleasant fact: the answer to most real-life attempts at persuasion is, "No." When the issue is big and emotional--gun control, abortion, affirmative action--not only does the writer usually not persuade, but often he or she provokes an angry response ranging anywhere from a nasty written reply to an actual physical attack. Obviously, these are not the results you wish to obtain. So--how do you go about writing a persuasion that actually persuades?
Click on each of the following topics in
turn for instructions and suggestions for writing a
successful persuasion:
The purpose The topic Audience awareness Emotional appeal Logical consistency Evidence, proof, statistics, authority The organization for a persuasion.
Reasonable expectations. The problem of inertia.
Your conclusion.
Things that will turn your audience off.
The purpose of a
persuasion.
Almost all the mistakes made in persuasions boil down to
one problem: misunderstanding the
purpose of a persuasion. You are not out to change
the world. You are not out to get someone
to change his entire life. All you can reasonably
ask is that your audience perform one brief
and simple action. If you ask too much, even the
audience that agrees with your point of view
will decide that it's too much trouble to do what you are
asking, and therefore they will do
nothing at all.
Remember,
Return to contents. Choose a topic with reasonable expectations
. You cannot expect to inspire an alcoholic or a
drug addict to kick the habit with a 1500-word theme. You
may persuade an alcoholic to come to
one AA meeting--with you. You may persuade parents
to buckle their own seatbelts after they've
carefully strapped their children in. You may
persuade your grandmother to go with you to the
shelter to look at the puppies and kittens. You may
persuade a busy working person to contribute
some money to a specific charity, or a college student to
participate in a walk-a-thon for that
charity.
Remember, Return to contents. Audience awareness
Direct your persuasion at a specific audience, the
more specific the better. The audience may
be as small as a single person, as large as a political party
or a generation of Americans. When
you group people together, however, be sure
they have enough similarities concerning the
subject of your persuasion that you may expect them to
have the same concerns, respect the
same authorities, etc. For example, while Americans over
age 60 are all likely to have the same
concerns about Social Security and Medicare, they are
not all likely to belong to the same
political party, feel the same about opera, or have the same
religious beliefs.
The better you know your audience, the better your
persuasion will be. The smaller your
audience is, and the closer to you, the higher the chances
you will know their feelings and be
able to persuade them. You know more people than you
think you do. Address your
roommate, your brother or sister, your father or mother, your
best friend. If you have been on a
mailing list for a long time, and know how the people on it
feel, address them. Address the
members of your fraternity or sorority, or your teammates in
a sport or on the cheerleading or
pep squad. Address the members of your Residential College.
Remember, Return to contents. Emotional Remember how we picked out emotional appeals in
advertising? People care deeply about health,
wealth, and love. Try to base your
introduction on one of those primal feelings. You
may use more than one, as well as any of the corollary
appeals that we noted.
Emotional appeal is particularly appropriate for
introductions. Use it to get your reader involved
in your topic by relating a powerful story connected
with your topic or else just paint a scene
as you have seen professional persuaders do. Think
of the big-eyed starving children shown to persuade you to
contribute to their care.
Remember, Return to contents. Logical consistency
Your know your persuasion should be logically
consistent. But what does that mean? Obviously,
you cannot contradict yourself or fact
and expect to persuade anyone.
In a persuasion, it is imperative to check your
facts, and also make certain nothing you say
in one part of the paper is contradicted in another.
However, sometimes logic and fact just aren't enough.
Remember Gloria Steinem's article
about her experiences trying to obtain advertising for
Ms. magazine? She had facts, statistics, and
logical arguments, but advertisers simply refused to
believe that business women purchased cars or makeup or food
items.
If you know you have the kind of audience Gloria Steinem
had, put your logical arguments first, as you know that for
that audience they are the weakest. Then
go on to make your case with evidence, proof, statistics, and
authority.
Return to contents If Gloria Steinem had been able to show an advertiser
evidence that another advertiser of a similar product had
increased sales by advertising in Ms., that would have
been very persuasive. Can you do something similar? Can you
refer your audience to an example very much like their own,
in which someone actually
gained something good by doing what you are asking? Be sure
that you are telling the truth--if your audience really cares,
they'll check it out.
What is the difference between evidence and proof?
Evidence is what we usually have--it very strongly
suggests that what we believe is
true. Proof is indisputable. Proof is a scientific
guarantee. We very rarely have absolute proof to back up our
assertions, so, like a good lawyer making
a case, we have to demonstrate how convincing our evidence is.
It is good to refer to authorities in a
persuasion. Authorities may be experts on a particular topic,
or people with actual experience in the
situation you are describing. You may find information from
authorities in books, magazines, journals, etc., or contact
them directly by telephone, letter, or e-mail. Identify
your authorities, and if they are not famous, give some
indication of why they are qualified as authorities on
this subject. State clearly where you got your
information, and put anything you copy in quotation
marks.
Be certain to choose authorities your audience
respects. You are unlikely to persuade the Murray
Women's Club by citing Madonna.
Use what you have learned in previous themes to organize
your paper. Often a three-point
structure, a comparison, or an analysis works well as the
underlying skeleton of a persuasion. A process can also work,
if you need to persuade your audience of
how simple it is to do what you are asking of them.
Never tell your audience in your introduction
that you want them to do something. If you do so before
the persuasion, they will stop reading
because they immediately assume either they don't want to do
it or it will take too much time or money. Only
after you have persuaded them of the importance of
your topic have you any chance of getting them to take
action, or spend time or money.
Put what you are asking the audience to do in your
conclusion, after the
persuasion. Be certain that you
have reasonable expectations for what
your audience may be willing to do.
Make the choice of what you ask for according to your
audience. Don't ask a husband and father to desert his
family and join the Peace Corps. Don't ask for money from
perpetually-broke college students; ask for time. Don't ask
for a lifelong commitment from anybody; ask for one
evening, one afternoon, one
donation. You may write the kind of persuasion in which you simply
ask your audience to consider a possibility--many academic
and scientific journal articles are this kind of persuasion.
At some point someone had to suggest that light, which had
always been thought to be made up of waves, was actually made
up of particles. Later someone else had to come up with the
theory that it is actually both. The only problem with this
kind of theme is that a freshman in college is usually not
enough of an expert yet in any field to be trying to persuade
anyone of a new theory in that field.
On the other hand, if you and your parents habitually fight
over some disagreement over morals or ethics, perhaps you can
persuade them to accept simply that you have the right to
make your own decisions now--not that you are right and they
are wrong, but that you are old enough to decide for yourself.
Careful! That is not as easy as it sounds!
Return to contents Remember that you must overcome INERTIA, one of the
strongest forces in nature. Whether
your audience cares about your topic or not, they will have
no motivation to do anything about it
unless you provide that motivation.
Return to contents Your conclusion is where you ask your audience to do
something. They may have guessed by now what you
want them to do, but you do not tell them until the
conclusion.
Remember that you must ask
something reasonable for
your audience to do, not a lifetime commitment, not a
huge sum of money, not a change of lifestyle. Ask for one
single step if what you are asking is a long-term goal.
For example, don't ask your roommate to commit to a fitness
program, but to come to the gym once, with you.
Make it as easy as possible for your audience to
do what you ask. Provide all necessary information--if you
are asking them to call someone, don't expect your audience
to look up the phone number. Provide it. If you are asking
them to contribute to a charity, try to find a toll free
number that takes credit cards, or a website that takes PayPal.
Don't ask people to write letters. You know how
much you love writing themes? That's how much people love
writing letters. Instead, provide phone and fax numbers
or an e-mail address. Or ask your audience to sign
a petition that you provide.
If you must ask for a letter, supply the
address, right down to the zip code. If there is an
e-mail address, supply it. Never expect the audience to do
your job of looking it up. If you possibly can, give a local
or toll-free telephone number. Phone calls are easy; letters
are hard work.
Whatever you ask, keep it easy and reasonable.
Return to contents Do not give your audience any reason to disregard you.
Because of inertia (the instinct not to
bother), your audience will seize upon mechanical errors,
boring padding, lack of logic, or
anything else you provide as an excuse not to take you
seriously.
Return to contents Always let a persuasion lie untouched at least overnight
before making your final copy. Reread
carefully for tone, and reword anything that sounds either
angry or whiny.
The persuasion paper is the most difficult kind of theme
to write. It requires far more than
simple competency. To be successful, it must have audience
awareness, emotional appeal, and
logical consistency. It must match what it asks for to the
audience at which it is directed. It can
have no turnoffs, such as errors in mechanics or sense, or
unreasonable expectations. The tone is
crucial; you will lose your reader if you sound either angry
or whiny. And finally, you must
seem completely reasonable throughout, with plenty of
evidence to support your point of view.
If a persuasion paper is weak in any of these areas, it will
simply fail to persuade, and you will
have wasted your efforts.
the secret to a successful persuasion is asking for something
it is reasonable
for your audience to do.
Avoid topics that have no solution.
Be careful not to kill your chances with your topic
choice. You won't bring peace to Iraq with a six-page theme.
You will not resolve the
abortion dilemma. You won't get people of opposing religions
to agree with one another. You
won't end crime or poverty. Don't waste your time
even thinking about a dispute that has
been around for generations and still has a large number of
supporters on both sides. If the
general public has not chosen a side in all that time, you
will not persuade any of them in 1500
words.
Instead, make your topic personal.
While it is impossible to persuade people who
have moral or ethical objections to abortion that it is a
good thing, or people who believe that a
fetus is only a fetus and not a person until it is born that
abortion is morally wrong, it is possible
to persuade someone you are very close to, a best friend or a
sister whose beliefs you
understand, to have or not to have an abortion, or to give an
infant up for adoption.
Personalize any big, unresolvable topic by making the
audience somebody you know and using
what you know about that specific person's feelings
on the subject.
the secret to a successful
persuasion is asking for something it is reasonable
for your audience to do.
Name your audience
at the top of your theme. That is part of your assignment.
Never ever, ever,
address a persuasion to everyone in the world! It
doesn't matter what
your topic is--there is simply no way that an Eskimo
fisherman, an Australian businesswoman, a
South African diamond trader, and a Japanese computer
programmer will have the same feelings
about it.
the secret to a successful
persuasion is asking for something it is reasonable
for your audience to do.
Be very cautious about using emotional
appeals in a persuasion. Never base a
persuasion on emotional appeal alone. Used
judiciously, however, emotional appeal can be extremely
powerful.
Be cautious about using humor!
It works well for negative purposes (remember the
Edsel),
or for selling a particular brand of a product everyone needs
anyway, but it rarely succeeds in
persuading anyone about a serious topic.
the secret to a successful
persuasion is asking for something it is reasonable for your
audience to do.
Evidence, proof, statistics,
authority.
The organization for a
persuasion.
Reasonable expectations
The senior citizen in a "no pets"
apartment cannot
adopt a puppy or kitten, but might be persuaded to join the
Humane Society and enjoy other people's
pets. If the person has a psychological block, do not try
to send him anywhere; take him to church, a
therapist, an AA meeting, a TOPS meeting.
The problem of inertia
Your conclusion
Never specify the amount
of a monetary donation; if, for example, you say $10.00, the
person who would otherwise have given $50.00 will give $10.00,
the person who would otherwise have given $2.00 will give
nothing, and your charity will lose $42.00.
Don't turn your audience off.
Finishing touches