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Persuasion

There is nothing tricky about those occasions when you can use what could be called straightforward persuasion. You can jump right in and give good information, argue with reason, and season the whole thing with good manners. "Can't you see how wrong you are?" There is nothing tricky about those occasions when you can use what could be called straightforward persuasion. You can jump right in and give good information, argue with reason, and season the whole thing with good manners. For example:

•	Your committee (company, neighborhood, school) has to choose between three plans. You have been appointed to study and recommend one. Your report will go to people in an audience who have not made up their minds yet. Indeed they are really asking you to help them make up their minds. They don't want tricky tactics or emotional appeals, they just want the best information and arguments. Your task is similar if you want to persuade them but are not yourself on the committee.
•	You are writing a letter to the newspaper to persuade readers to vote for a certain candidate or measure, but you are trying primarily to sway the undecided readers, not the enemy. (Some studies show that more people read letters to the editor than any other section of most newspapers.)
•	You are writing a job application or applying for a scholarship.
You know the reader has to give someone the job and is trying to find the best candidate and so will read your qualifications with interest. It's important in such pieces of writing not to be bashful, roundabout, defensive, or coy in telling your strengths. In a kind of neutral, disinterested, and succint way, you must frankly brag. (If the reader has a huge stack of applications to read; he will probably make a lot of 60-second eliminations in order to cut the number of applications down to manageable proportions before reading them carefully. Therefore, you must summarize your best material in your opening paragraph or cover sheet -- don't include there anything questionable that could be used to eliminate you.)

What makes these occasions for straightforward persuasion is that your readers are open to your words either because they have not made up their minds or because you have some kind of authority on the topic or because they need to make a decision and are therefore open to new information or arguments. Your job is clear: to present the best information and arguments in the most reasonable and human way.Before going on to tricky persuasion I suggest this one simple but deep strategy for straight-forward persuasion. Try hard to find good arguments for your position, but then try even harder to find arguments to refute yours. Then figure out how to answer those refutations. That is, the doubting game or the dialectical process turns out to be a powerful way to generate good persuasion. The strength of your argument depends more than anything else on your willingness to be a smart lawyer for the opposition. The only problem with this strategy is that you sometimes discover your original position is wrong. But that's useful information, too.What concerns me in this chapter, however, are tricky audience situations and, in this case, I am thinking about the many times when you are trying to persuade someone in a straightforward way but actually you are wasting your time.

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You are writing a letter to the newspaper to persuade readers about a certain bill or candidate or situation, but this time your position is a minority one. Perhaps you want to argue for an end to all armaments -- or income taxes or welfare. Or perhaps you are writing about a polarized issue like some of the recent bottledeposit bills and you are not satisfied just to write to the relatively few middle of the roaders with open minds. If your bill is to win, you've got to change some of your opponents' minds.

You are trying to dissuade someone from dropping out of college or hitchhiking around the country or divorcing you. Or trying to persuade your reader to accept your decision to do one of those things.

You are writing an article or pamphlet or leaflet to persuade workers at a nuclear plant that nuclear power is a bad thing; or to persuade intellectual undergraduate women that abortions should be illegal.

What makes these attempts at persuasion tricky is that you are addressing your words to people who have a stake in what you are trying to refute. You are caught in a bind. The more you try to persuade them, the more their stake in their view causes them to dig in their heels. For you to win they must define themselves as losers. You can't argue without making your readers into your enemy, and enemies can't be persuaded -- only beaten. But you can't beat people with words -- or at least not if they don't consent to be beaten -- because of that brute fact about reading: words only work if they are inflated with human breath and it's the reader who has to do the blowing. ^* Why should the enemy pedal if you are steering where he doesn't want to go? "Let me come up to your tower and show you that you are stupid for opposing deposits onbottles," but your reader has to haul you up in the hand-crank elevator. Why should he? "Let me show you movies to prove you are a murderer for condoning abortion," only the reader has to crank the generator to make electricity for your movies. So what can you do? Trick them? Say "I have a wonderful trip I want to show you, you'll love it," and get them to pedal while you steer and then suddenly take a turn down the path they hate? Keep your destination secret? "Have you ever thought about the fact that all men are mortal? Odd, isn't it? And perhaps you haven't ever looked at it this way before, but, you know, Socrates is a man. HA HA! GOTCHA! Socrates is mortal!" If your readers have a stake in what you are arguing against, you cannot take straightforward persuasion as your goal. You must resist your impulse to change their beliefs. You have to set your sights much lower. The best you can hope for -- and it is hoping for a great deal -- is to get your readers just to understand your point of view even while not changing theirs in the slightest. If you can get readers actually to entertain or experience your position for just a moment, you have done a wonder, and your best chance of getting them to do so is not by asking them to believe or adopt your point of view at all. In short, stop trying to persuade the enemy and settle for planting a seed. If you think about the way people actually do change their beliefs -- which is rarely -- it is usually a gradual process and depends on a seed lying dormant for awhile. Something has to get them to a position where they might say, "Imagine that. He actually believes that stuff and he's not crazy. I never could imagine a sane person thinking the country could get along without an army. I always thought it was some kind of emotional hang-up -something odd said by people who have a thing about uniforms or guns or something. I didn't realize that there really were coherent arguments. Of course they are all wrong, deeply misguided arguments, but now I can see why they appeal. It's interesting to know what it's like for a person to actually see things that way." If you can get a reader to take your point of view for just that one conditional moment -- to inflate your words with his breaththen future events will ocassionally remind him of the experience. Contrary views are inherently intriguing. And if your position has any merit, your reader will begin -- very gradually of course -- to notice things that actually support it. For the first time, for example, he will begin to notice specific incidents when armies or armaments increase danger to his country rather than decrease it. A seed is the best you can hope for. So how do you plant a seed? You do it by getting the person actually to see through your eyes. There are many ways of doing this, but I think they all depend on one essential inner act by you: seeing through his eyes. And it's not enough just to do it as an act of shrewd strategic analysis: "Let's see what actually passes for thinking in the minds of those rednecks." For them to experience your point of view even for a moment, they must let down their guard. You can't get them to do so unless you let down yours, too: actually experience their point of view from the inside, not just analyze it. Though persuading can employ the doubting game, planting a seed calls for the believing game. What does this mean in practice? If you relinquish your effort to make readers change their beliefs and settle instead for trying to get them merely to entertain yours for a moment, and if you start with an honest attempt to see things through their eyes, you will find a whole range of specific ways to write your letter, article, or report -- depending on your skills and temperament. You can trust your instincts once you understand your goal: somehow to persuade readers to work with you rather than against you in the job of breathing life into your words. For example, if I were writing a short article or leaflet to readers with a stake in what I'm trying to refute, I wouldn't say, "Here's why you should believe nuclear power is bad." How can I get them to invest themselves in words which translate "Here's why you've been bad or stupid"? I would take an approach which said, "Here are the reasons and experiences that have made me believe nuclear power is bad. Please try to understand them for a moment." There are various ways to try to get readers to work with you. Your best choice depends upon your temperament and the circumstances. But if you are trying to change deeply held beliefs, autobiography, biography, and fiction turn out to be among the most effective types of writing. After all, changing a belief requires having an experience, not just getting some information or logic, and it's not surprising if imaginative and experiential writing sometimes prove more effective than argument. ^* It's no accident that people so often use arguments on the enemy that only work on allies. Most of the things that feel like good arguments only work on people who agree with you or are at least open-minded. It's all too easy, as you are writing along in your room, to start hammering home arguments which prove resoundingly that the enemy is wrong! These feel like good arguments because of a mix-up about audience. We have let ourselves forget the real audience and started to write a speech about the evils of nuclear power that is just perfect for people who already believe nuclear power is evil. It would bring down the house at an anti-nuclear rally. But unfortunately it will make no headway at all on someone who doesn't already agree. So what works on opponents? There is no simple answer. You need feedback to find out. Very few people get accurate honest feedback from an opponent as to how their arguments are working -- feedback that says, "Here's what it felt like being your opponent and reading your words. Here are the places where you actually made a dent on me, made me listen, made me actually consider your words seriously, and here are the places where you just made me dig in my heels all the harder against you."The only occasion when we are likely to get sincere, thoughtful feedback from an opponent is when we write something for a teacher who happens to disagree. But teachers usually don't give you "here'swhat-it-felt-like-to-be-your-enemy" feedback. Usually they try to extricate themselves from combat and give you more theoretical feedback about the quality of your reasoning and use of evidencefeedback on exactly those techniques of persuasion that won't work here because they only work on disinterested readers with no stake in the issue.What you need then more than anything else is feedback from opponents. It's not easy to get, but it's possible. Find a friend who is an opponent on your issue and coax him to give you honest feedback. To get a helpful opponent you may have to ask a favor of a friend's friend. And if you can't make a friendly contact with someone who disagrees strongly with you on the issue you are writing about (shouldn't that be cause for concern?) you can practice on other topics where you and your friends actually disagree. Summary and Advice

•	For any persuasive writing, take time to think carefully about your relationship to your audience and what you are asking of it. Can you really hope to make those people agree with you or should you settle more realistically for just trying to get them to listen to you? Have they made up their minds yet? If so, how much stake do they have in the view you want them to abandon? Do they have any special reasons to listen to you? Is there some authority you have which they will accept? Is there some new decision or action they must perform that might make them willing to consider new information and arguments? In short, are you trying to persuade or to plant a seed?
•	How much do you have at stake in the issue? If you are argu-
	ing for one of your important beliefs, you will probably have an almost irrepressible urge to make readers agree with you -- an urge that may destroy any chance of success.
	Get accurate feedback -- especially from the enemy. Find readers who will tell you honestly what their position was before they read your piece, what happened to them as they read, and what changes, if any, were finally produced in their views. It's often discouraging feedback because words seldom produce change of position, but if you are trying to persuade, perhaps the most useful thing you can learn is how seldom it is possible.
	There's one more strategy that does wonders whether you are trying to get someone to agree or just to listen: be right. If you're right you can sometimes succeed even though your writing has serious weaknesses. Reality helps you make your case. (It's not foolproof, of course, since sometimes being right makes you so insufferable that people are willing to stay wrong just for a chance to disagree with you.) It sometimes helps you to define your task of persuasion as part of a larger task of finding out the truth.
	Whether you are trying to persuade an open-minded reader to agree with what you are saying or trying to get an enemy reader simply to experience what you are saying, there is one essential thing you must learn: how to enter wholeheartedly into the skin of your readers and see or argue as they would.

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