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Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side

Trish Hall

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language-arts

Chapter 13

  • A former hedge-fund trader named Sam Polk once sent a draft of an article dealing with his wealth addictionJun 29 2023 11:32PM
  • Tim Kreider, an essayist and cartoonist who frequently contributes to the Times, wrote about his passion for his cat—a piece that was later selected for a book on the best essays of the year.Jun 29 2023 11:32PM
  • All of us have stories to tell. The strongest ones, the ones that people will remember, often reveal something almost painfully personal even as they connect to a larger issue or story that feels both universal and urgentJun 29 2023 11:32PM

Chapter 15

  • Don’t tell people how to feel, or not feel, or whoever you’re talking to will stop talking. Start by giving people a chance to explain their ideas and feelings, and you will seem agreeable and willing to listen. Cut them off, and you will never persuade them of anything.Jun 29 2023 11:34PM
  • What liberals should read and watch to understand the other viewpoint: The Wall Street Journal editorial page The National Review The Federalist Drudge Fox News What conservatives should read to understand the other viewpoint: The New Yorker Slate The New York Times Politico The Washington PostJun 29 2023 11:35PM
  • That is a classic approach: If you think this, why do you also think something that appears to be the opposite? Pointing out a contradiction might make your audience look at an issue differently. Sometimes showing that you understand your audience is simple. Just start your essay by telling them that you know what sorts of things they worry about, because you worry about the same things.Jun 29 2023 11:37PM

Chapter 16

  • If you establish commonality and then bring up an issue that might be a source of disagreement, your audience is much more willing to listen because of the connection you have already made. Research by psychologists has confirmed and reconfirmed that phenomenon. By agreeing with your audience, you’re much more likely to change their minds, as counterintuitive as that might sound.Jun 29 2023 11:37PM
  • “Monkey see, monkey do” is a powerful phrase, but the see part is really important.Jun 29 2023 11:39PM

Chapter 17

  • They drive our rational conclusions, in the sense that the conclusions are just an excuse to justify the feelingsJun 29 2023 11:41PM
  • Being optimistic—or slightly in denial—is an evolutionary advantage. It makes us psychologically able to keep venturing into the world, taking risks, and believing in the future. (But it also makes us a bit stupid about things we ought to do, like saving for retirement and scheduling unpleasant medical tests like colonoscopies.)Jun 29 2023 11:42PM
  • In your persuasive writing, remember that scaring people and being negative does not generally agree with our fundamental natures. We are hardwired for optimism, so we generally respond better to positive messages than negative ones.Jun 29 2023 11:42PM

Chapter 18

  • You have to be nonjudgmental to establish that rapport. You have to lose any desire to dominate and instead, create the feeling that you are in a partnership.Jun 29 2023 11:46PM
  • And if you’re in a one-on-one situation, it’s important to make clear that the other person doesn’t owe you anythingJun 29 2023 11:46PM

Chapter 19

  • Generalizing about people is a major way to be hostile in writing. It’s aggravating and off-putting when writers take a stance that all poor people are lazy, all white people are bad; all men, predators; and all women, kind and gentle. You get the idea.Jun 29 2023 11:47PM

Chapter 21

  • There are classic story forms. I learned one of the simplest and most effective in a television writing course: Get your character up a tree. Then get him down, in minutes. Done.Oct 31 2023 4:38PM
  • People are attracted to stories about disaster, about facing adversity and overcoming challenges, about conflict and self-doubt, and about connections made despite some kind of obstacle.Jun 29 2023 11:48PM
  • Stories have to be narratives about something that happened to someone, with a time, a place, a main character, and some interesting development.Oct 31 2023 4:38PM
  • Look for suspense. What is the dilemma? How will it be resolved? It’s suspense that keeps us addicted to television shows that go on for many seasons. Create tension in the story by making readers wonder what will happen next.Oct 31 2023 4:41PM
  • Create a transformation. When people read or watch a story about someone who changed in a way they would like to emulate, they are more interested in the facts underlying that transformation.Oct 31 2023 4:41PM
  • Use images to help your viewers see. Kimmel did this when he described his baby waiting in the hospital for a lifesaving surgery. Our brains react to image and help transport us into the story. The characters and the setting are so real that they become part of your life.Oct 31 2023 4:41PM
  • Be logical in telling what happened. Otherwise people will get confused. You want to keep them engaged, not give them a reason to stop reading or watching.Oct 31 2023 4:41PM
  • Make sure the end focuses on the message you want your readers to take away. People are most likely to remember the ending, so don’t let your tale just trail off.Oct 31 2023 4:41PM

Chapter 22

  • One study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that false news moves faster on Twitter than true news, because people prefer it and find it more interesting. They found that it took true stories about six times as long as false ones to reach 1,500 people. And this result applied to every subject area, from celebrity gossip to scientific findings.Oct 31 2023 4:42PM
  • Having spent my life gathering and evaluating facts, naturally I believed in the power of, well, truth. The year 2016 did me in, as it did others. After the British voted to leave the European Union and Americans elected Donald Trump president, the Oxford Dictionaries chose post-truth as the word of the year for 2016. Both elections had been filled with lies, but the voters didn’t seem to care.Oct 31 2023 4:43PM
  • Our misplaced fears are intensified because politicians and media focus on the aberrant—it is, after all, more exciting—and so people fear the unusual to an extent that’s way out of proportion to the actual danger. Once you scare people, that scary thought will more easily come to mind.Nov 3 2023 9:19AM
  • But while facts can change behavior, they don’t usually change it on their own. They have to be paired with peer pressure, social norms, and emotional appeals.Nov 3 2023 9:22AM
  • An editor friend of mine remembers a long-ago article in The New Yorker by Michael Kinsley that changed the way he thought about polling. In the piece, Kinsley wrote about a poll that asked people whether they thought the United States was spending too much, too little, or just the right amount on foreign aid. The poll also asked them what they thought the government was spending. Most thought the government was spending far more than it actually was. That article, my friend said, showed him that there’s little value in asking people questions regarding matters they know nothing about, unless you’re trying to determine their level of knowledge.Nov 3 2023 9:25AM

Chapter 23

  • language was illustrated by a series of widely shared tweets in 2016 by twenty-two-year-old Nafisa Rawji. In her series, she took on the question of sex and consent by comparing it to something we all understand: money and robbery. Here are a few of her tweets: If you ask me for $5, and I’m too drunk to say yes or no, it’s not okay to then go take $5 out of my purse. If I let YOU borrow $5, that doesn’t give the right for your FRIEND to take $5 out of my purse. “But you gave him some, why can’t I?” If you steal $5 and I can’t prove it in court, that does NOT mean you didn’t steal $5. Just because I gave you $5 in the past, doesn’t mean I have to give you $5 in the future. And to think a man said “Well she sat on his lap & went to his house.” Okay, if I ask you to hold my purse, does that mean you can take $?Nov 3 2023 9:58PM

Chapter 24

  • He made the reader look at a common subject in a different way, showing them that people were choosing this state of constant busyness, a condition that he called “a hedge against emptiness.”Nov 25 2023 4:22PM

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