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Ten timeless persuasive techniques that will convince your readers

When you are able to get your readers to agree with your story writing then that becomes a persuasive writing. Mastering the art of persuasive writing or learning the skill associated with it can be a beneficial skill for anyone. It is possible to write a persuasive piece by building it upon a series of facts in which the writer can argue his or her point of view. In the persuasive form of writing the writer presents his or his side of the story so well, that readers are left with not much room for raising any arguments. Your case may become more persuasive and compelling if you follow the 10 strategic techniques given here.

1. Repetition

When it comes to being persuasive with your readers, it is imperative that you use good repetition by using an example or a famous quote to make your point. Repetition is crucial since your readers can not agree with you, if they are not able to understand what you are trying to argue about.

2. Reasons why

Even if a particular reason makes no sense, your readers will be more willing to comply if you give a reasonable explanation. Always give reasons as to why, if you want people to be more receptive to your way of thinking.

3. Consistency

Consistency in our actions and thoughts is a valued social trait and when used in your writing, your reader will be able to agree with something up front rather than disagreeing with. Use plenty of supporting evidence to rigorously make your case, by pointing back to the opening case which has already been accepted.

4. Social proof

Social guidance from others is the best way of determining our ability in delivering aid to others, and mustering the courage to kill your own self within. Testimonials and outside referrals are the examples of social proof and what makes for social media as the main driving force. By alignments with outside authorities and skillful name droppings you can casually integrate some elements of this social proof in your writing.

5. Comparisons

The persuasive writer is able to use similes, metaphors and analogies by relating the scenario to something which the readers already accept as true. This is the ideal way of convincing someone to see a certain situation from your point of view.

6. Agitate and solve

In order to protect your case from an overall perspective, you need to first identify the problem and then deal with your reader’s reaction. This is the persuasive way of agitating your reader’s pain before you provide the answer as a solution to make it better. This is the empathy that will figure in the agitating phase, which clearly speaks of your ability to understand that pain or that you have the experience to eliminate it.

7. Prognosticate

Giving your readers a glimpse into the future is another persuasive theme, which convincingly presents current affairs into future outcomes. If your claims are backed by your ability to grasp the subject matter, there is nothing better than this. If your readers discern that you do not understand what you are talking about or contradicting yourself, then you will appear rather foolish which will damage your credibility.

8. Go tribal

Give your readers a chance to join in your group by giving them what they want as humans are exclusionary by nature. These could be about being wealthy or going green or even hip which is bound to interest certain people. Find out which group people want to be in and extend invitations for them to join in by appearing exclusive.

9. Address objections

At least a majority of your readers will be tough so while presenting potential objections, you really need to be well versed in your arguments of the subject matter.

10. Story telling

If you are a good story teller, then you will allow your readers to persuade themselves into making independent choices of what is right. Using the story telling persuasion with the other techniques mentioned above will truly speak of your persuasive ability towards your readers.

With these techniques mentioned above, you will become better at your persuasive skill of convincing others to agree with you, share your values and accept your arguments and conclusions.

About the author:  Alia Haley is a blogger who is a tech freak.  She has a weak side for gadgets and bikes. Recently an article on Apple iMac attracted her attention. Beside this she is busy in writing an article on Free Android Applications.

On writing resolutions, Sarah Allen said:

Wonderful resolutions! I like the finding a new voice one. There are certain forms or characters I don’t feel comfortable with, but I think I might experiment with them anyway just to stretch myself and see what happens.

Thanks, Sarah — new voices can really stretch our writing abilities in my opinion. Some writers make it a regular challenge to write each book in a different voice or style — it can force us to learn new words or even empathize with new perspectives.

mary said:

We’re not supposed to keep stopping projects when they get tough & relegate them to that file or drawer you speak of–we don’t learn anything that way.

So, as you suggest, I’m going to pull out those moldering first drafts & see how I can MAKE them work. I know there is something there–I read parts aloud to others who were very POed when I said, “And that’s all I’ve got so far…”

Actually,several are complete drafts, but I just dread “re-write.” Still, it must be done. Perhaps this will be the Year of the Rewrite for me–& that is a big enough goal, for sure.

Thanks, mary — you’ve put it better than I have for sure. Not every story will end up being our best, but we can learn something from every imperfect story and the struggle we go through to make it work. If we give up the moment a story becomes imperfect, we’ll be left with a drawer full of coulda-woulda-shoulda stories. And the Year of the Rewrite is a noble goal! Best of luck with it.

After the jump: more inspiring responses.

Mela said:

My writing resolution for this year? Get back to work. Life’s ups and downs have sidetracked me for the past year or so and, much to my chagrin, I have let them. Ain’t happening no more! Also going to start getting my work out there by whatever means available.

Admirable goal, Mela! It’s true that life tends to come between us and our work, but only because we tacitly let it. Writing can potentially happen anywhere, even in the midst of most crises. And we should all focus more on getting our work out in the public eye — there will be plenty of posts about tips I’ve learned on the publishing trail this year as well.

Eularee said:

Lost my editor in November. My Dad passed away. A published author, life long reporter he died before finishing his deadline. Rather than have him haunt me from the grave, I finished his deadline. Having a tough time finding my voice again. After writing this month’s column, I realized it was the first time he would not be there to edit my copy. New Year’s resolution is to get a calendar and fill it with writing deadlines. I think my editor is smiling.

Thanks for sharing this, Eularee. We all have mentors or heroes who got us our start or helped keep us on the hard, rocky road to writing success. When we lose these mentors, it may seem impossible to continue on, but we should remember what our mentors would have wanted for us. As you write, it sounds like your father would have wanted you to stick to a deadline. There’s something almost holy to a writer about the pure honest work of getting a piece done in time — so honor that impulse and keep working until the voice returns to you.

Now let’s see a few comments on my post about the best writing tools of 2011. Some of my favorites included Ommwriter, Simplenote, and Kusmi Tea.

Drew said:

Thanks for writing this! I definitely will try out some of these for my own writing. Simplenote seems like a god-send for my random spurts of creativity.

Thanks, Drew — and best of luck with your own novel in progress! As you say, creativity can often come in fits and starts — and Simplenote is my favorite techie way to keep my frantic isolated notes organized. No longer do I have scraps of paper or three different notebooks to keep track of!

mary said:

Can you come up with anything for a Luddite with a non-Mac laptop computer? This Luddite does not have a smartphone, either. She barely will use a dumb phone.

Good point, mary — a lot of my reviews are tech-centered, but there are always non-Mac or non-tech solutions that I should be reviewing more often. For that, I’d direct you to my earlier review about my favorite kind of notebook, from Bookbinders Design. There’s also an online text editor for anyone with a web browser that I’ve heard good things about, called DarkCopy. It is an online version of the great software WriteRoom. Try it out if you like!

Hope you enjoyed the recommendations, writers — I’ll see you back here soon!

You are a bad cop.

This is the first hard truth that writers need to realize: we are actually very bad at policing ourselves. Let’s be honest: on the whole, we’re terrible at it. This is true in any area of life that requires willpower and discipline; for example, dieters fall on and off the wagon constantly, as do exercisers. Willpower is a finite resource, and we will save it for when it really counts — that is, for when we will have to be showing results to people other than ourselves.

The only way to get disciplined, therefore, is to admit what we can’t do! Sometimes that is working and writing without accountability. Your accountable person or persons can be a close friend, a relative, a significant other, or a writing group, as long as it is someone whose esteem you value, someone who will hold you to your pledge. You will always have an excuse for yourself; other people won’t accept excuses so easily.

After the jump: more reasons accountability is crucial.

Writers thrive on community.

Here’s another reason that being accountable to someone is a great idea. While some writing must take place alone, a great deal of the writing life could benefit from community. We use community to validate our career choice, to remind ourselves that others are struggling with the same issue, and to have people to turn stories in to. I think the element of community is particularly important for women writers; while all the books that get reviewed or get all the attention may seem to be by men, having a writing community that includes women can help us remember that women writers are out there. If you’re accountable to another writer, you’ll be motivated to turn in something that is up to a high standard. When you’ve had a long day, you’ll still push yourself to get the work done instead of leaving it for another day.

We write for an audience; we need readers.

We need to be accountable to people other than ourselves for the very reason that we write — because we write for readers! Therefore, it makes sense to say that we need people to actually read our work. We need someone to keep us grounded in reality, reminding us once in a while if we’re on the right or the wrong track. Without that sense of context once in a while, our work could become bloated, self-indulgent, grandiose or divorced from real human emotion.

It’s important to remember that we work best when we acknowledge the web of interdependence we’re all a part of. This is true of even supposedly solitary disciplines like writing. So reach out and find someone who will keep you honest.

As I was warned, Blood Meridian is bloody. It is full of atrocities such as casual scalpings, brutal massacres, and jail-cell or wartime torture. What is most disturbing about this violence, though, is how it’s treated; McCarthy’s style is the definition of hard-boiled, and every midnight-black event is presented baldly, free of emotion or judgment. Our main character, the Kid, seems unaffected by all that he sees, merely trying to survive, wandering from one bloody clash to the next. So what is McCarthy trying to say about violence? He might be arguing that it is fundamental to the human condition, which is a compelling point. But more than that, he might be arguing that there is something purifying, something redemptive, something deeply cleansing about being washed in blood.

The review on the cover of my copy says it all: according to critic Michael Herr, Blood Meridian is “A classic American novel of regeneration through violence.” I haven’t finished the book yet, but already I’m wondering — what does he mean by that? Could McCarthy be arguing the unthinkable — that we need violence to be fully human?

It’s a deeply troubling question, but one that I’m glad McCarthy is raising. Other novelists who indulge in violence are usually repugnant to me because they present it as a kind of pornography, eroticizing the violence, tying it firmly to a deep-seated hatred or fear of women. That may come later, but from what I’ve seen so far, McCarthy isn’t marrying violence with sexuality or arguing that women have no place in his world. His story is about men, but it is an historical tale, and the violence is not eroticized. It is, instead, simply what it is: brutal, often purposeless, often strangely fascinating.

How to handle violence yourself

Regardless of how it might seem, we live in a less violent world than humans have ever inhabited before. Violence is slowly getting stamped out of our DNA, first becoming shameful, then becoming dirty, finally, possibly, becoming evil once and for all. But in fiction, violent acts will always be powerful and evocative. They have a way of clarifying things by forcing characters to make hard choices. Violence has a way of finally making the sides well-defined and the heroes and villains more obvious. In that way, violence can “redeem” a story, finally blowing away the smoke.

So how will you write about violence in your stories? Will you avoid it on principle, or will you take a test swim in McCarthy’s dark waters? Adding violence easily heightens the stakes of your story; but I urge you to avoid the easy pitfalls I mentioned earlier. Don’t eroticize violence; don’t assume that some people deserve to bear its brunt; don’t let characters become less than human. Violence has a nasty way of turning us into less than our true selves. I’m willing to read McCarthy, though, and see how oddly attractive violence can be, in its ability to make the line between choices and consequences so stark.

Another way this trope appears in movies is with the deceased. After a character dies, it’s impossible to find out more about what his or her life was like without detective work. A check in the date book will reveal the secret fight club she was attending, or the dog shows he’d been attending that no one knew about. Character – revealed!

All this is a reminder that the date book — or its modern equivalent — is a treasure trove of character. You may not keep a paper date book anymore — I know I’ve moved to iCal, and even my parents have moved on from the same black leather calendar they used to get every year and now use Google or Yahoo calendars. All the same, a paper or electronic date book is where our lives truly unfold. Date books tell stories about characters’ lives, just as they’re used for detective work in movies. They tell people who we care about meeting and when; who we’re dating; who we’re keeping secrets from; what hobbies we have; and what we don’t want others to know. Date books are as intimate as diaries in many ways.

After the jump: using date books in fiction.

Using Date Books as Plot Devices

Do you keep a date book? To learn how to use one in fiction, try studying your own for starters. Note what you actually write down and the idiosyncratic way we take notes when we know we’re the only ones likely to read them. Notice abbreviations and errors. What do you keep in your head without writing down? What goes in the date book?

Introduce tension through discovery

Of course, our own date books aren’t mysteries to ourselves; the source of suspense comes from a character’s attempt to understand another. This struggle is fundamental to many stories; the date book is just a convenient modern tool for drawing that tension out. In order to make it part of your plot, give us something we don’t know about in the date book. Let us try to puzzle out a note’s meaning as though it were a hieroglyphic. Let the appointment come up; let your sleuth character go to the appointment, but not figure out immediately what it might be. Above all, let the date book act as a window into another person’s identity. For a large part, we live secret lives, letting others see only minimal, carefully controlled slivers of what we really are doing and thinking. Let a tool like a date book do the miraculous, and look beyond that sliver.

I always enjoy delving into short stories; they teach me about form, function, and language even more than most novels, and they’re too often neglected. Let’s take today’s review, James Joyce’s Dubliners, as a prime example; it is usually overshadowed by his mammoth and far more opaque novels Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. Both of those novels are well worth reading (I assume; I haven’t gotten to Finnegan’s Wake yet), but it is the slim collection of short stories that I believe can teach writers more about writing. These short stories are also an important stop on the march of evolution of the short story. Following Chekhov, the father of the modern short, we cannot neglect Joyce, who defined the concerns and structure of short stories in a new way.

After that introduction to whet your appetite, let’s start with some good news: Dubliners is in the public domain, and can be downloaded for free in a variety of formats at Project Gutenberg. I had read it years ago in high school, but I decided to re-visit it recently on my Kindle; it’s great protein powder for anyone trying to tighten up their language. Dubliners is a series of profiles, as the title implies; it aims to capture a wide range of stories, all of them unfolding in the city itself. Dubliners is a very Irish work, with familiar tropes and archetypes; the stories are often populated by kind or oppressive priests, drunken and abusive fathers, stern schoolmasters, and long-suffering wives. The characters are familiar, but each story is unique; Joyce makes each character’s story seem unusual, heartfelt, or surprisingly tender or brutal.

There are many things to learn from these lean, telling stories, but one main reason that they work is that each character does have a plight, a problem of real drama. Boys out of school on a carefree afternoon find themselves followed by a threatening older man; a girl decides whether to elope; a man endangers his job by repeating old habits. Many of the stories are shadowed by a very heavy, very Irish-Catholic sense of guilt, shame, sin, and the precariousness of virtue. People can make one poor mistake that will lead to disaster; the danger of sin, or of disfavor with the city, with God, and with oneself, is never more than a step away. Joyce reminds us that all of the quiet drama unfolding in a city is rich, complex, and human.

Simply put, Dubliners is good education for writers, and pure enjoyment for readers. The stories often end in the middle, or with problems unresolved; while this made some of the stories seem more like sketches, in most it seemed to make Joyce’s point about the never-ending conflict of the many lives in a great city like Dublin.

What is the little girl looking at as she rides through a vibrant night city? What is she thinking about? Try writing a story about her for this week’s inspiration.

On choosing the right subject, Savanna said:

This was fun to read, I’ve had similar experiences in Creative Writing groups, or classes. I’ll admit that I’ve never taught one, but upon sharing work I find that I’m listening to a multitude of pleasant (boring) stories regarding the beach.

Personally, I’m a big fan of conflict. Without some form of conflict within my own stories, I get bored with my own writing and move on to something else. I think that it’s a key element in short fiction.

Thanks, Savanna! I don’t know why people seem to think that their vacations will be interesting fictional fodder for others to read — it’s like telling other people our dreams! But I’m just as guilty — for some reason, I often find myself shying away from that most essential story ingredient, conflict. It’s true that without conflict in my story, even I’m likely to get bored with it.

Margaret said:

I’m 65, and there are still experiences in my life I don’t want to write about for publication. Perhaps the students are suffering from “my God, I can’t write about that. People will know that…” Self-revelation, which is IMO what happens when we write about subjects that matter to us, is inevitable in such cases.

Good point, Margaret — I think many of us want to avoid writing about personally traumatic or disturbing events. The fun of fiction, however, is that we can make our characters suffer — though if the subject hits too close to home or we get too attached to our characters, we may feel like the events are happening to us anyway. As commenter mary brady points out, why would people want to read all the darkness and turmoil that made us miserable? What’s important to remember, however, is that fiction can be a way of taking control of a subject, of making sense and order out of it, or at least shutting it away, safe on the page. Students who are afraid to put fictional conflict in their stories should remember that we read to learn about conflict — and sometimes, we read to learn how to resolve conflicts of our own.

After the jump: responding to and writing after trauma.

On my post about finding words after trauma, Margaret said:

I found that writing in my journal was the most helpful to me. I was able to journal when I couldn’t write anything else. No matter if I wrote about trivia — cafeteria food, cold coffee, the sunny weather — it helped unstop the words (and the emotions). Everything else — poetry, fiction — had to wait until I had a certain amount of distance and have gained some perspective.

Thank you, Margaret, and thank you for the well wishes. I agree that focusing on small things and just keeping the old writing muscle limber can often be wonderfully soothing — and it’s a perfectly reasonable way of staying prepared for when real inspiration returns. Write small until the big urge comes!

mary said:

I second what Margaret says. To force any words too soon won’t help at all. And frankly, you ARE doing something when you space out watching TV or whatever–you are letting time pass. Deep, deep inside you are absorbing whatever is happening. You’re not conscious of it, but it’s going on.

Thanks for this wise observation, mary. Time does have a remarkable way of carrying us forward through grief and softening the edges of our emotions. The saying goes that comedy is tragedy plus time, and while not all tragedy turns into comedy, there are ways that we’ll be able to see warmth and kindness and normalcy again. We keep breathing, we keep thinking, we keep writing, we keep being ourselves.

Brooklynn said:

I understand. That feeling down in your fingers, the itching to write, but then sucking it inside by some mindless task till the desire goes away. Because it seems so much better to hush your way through life or maybe if you write it on paper it could suddenly make it true and you don’t want that. stop. Don’t write.

And later, Brooklynn added:

Even writing that small blog helped me. You should try writing small things even if they don’t make sense. try even just writing words so it helps get your mind working

Thanks, Brooklynn, for making such a compelling point — and proving that writing can help us, even if it’s just commenting on a blog! Now that the new year is here, I find myself newly committed to my writing goals — and every day that I write is a much better day than the ones when I don’t. Even a paragraph or two makes me feel like I’m creating something with meaning and purpose.

Phil South wrote:

Obviously it’s a personal choice. If one gets catharsis from writing about your life to make sense of it and it’s why you do it then one should write through grief or trauma. Of course.

For myself I have still not written about my own personal trauma, despite being a professional writer for 20 years before and 10 years after the events. I’m just not ready. Not in a horrible, ooky, “can’t think about it” kind of way, because at this stage I can think about it, the loss of a loved one to insanity, freely and honestly. It doesn’t make me feel great, but I can face it and imagine ways I could fictionalise it and potentially make something truly moving and transformative. It’s bound to be powerful because my feelings about it are powerful. But I’m not ready to commit something so personal to the page. Not yet.

Thanks for sharing your own writing struggle, Phil. The fact that you’re able to think about these events in terms of story and structure to me seems like what a writer needs for catharsis. Writers need to give their lives shape and order, and when we lose this sense of an internal structure we feel despair. But there’s always a way to turn something into a humanizing story — even if it’s not a story that ever ends up on the page. Good luck in your work.

Thanks for such kind, thoughtful, and thought-provoking comments, readers — keep writing in, and I’ll keep responding. See you next week!