All writing is persuasive writing.
Let me persuade you.
To persuade is to be human.
Animals can’t do it. They can beg and implore. They can threaten and intimidate. But persuasion is beyond them.
Perhaps more importantly to right now, artificial intelligence can’t do it either. An AI – quite literally – doesn’t have any skin in the game. ChatGPT doesn’t care if it changes your mind. It doesn’t care if you heed its advice. It doesn’t care if you read its regurgitations or not. It doesn’t care.
And caring is essential to persuasion. It requires sublimating what you want into the wants and needs of someone else. It’s nuanced and subtle. Equal parts rational and emotional, intellectual and empathetic. To do it well, you must infer, intuit, or imagine another’s perspective, then direct all your argument and charm only to where it will have most purchase.
To study persuasion, then, is to study something pretty fundamental about humans. It’s about how we connect, how we interact, and how we can live alongside each other without the need for the baser forms of coercion.
And that’s why I think all writing is persuasive writing.
Any time a message is being communicated, an element of persuasion is involved. The techniques are most obvious in the places we expect persuasive writing – an advert persuading you to ‘buy now’, a political speech persuading you to ‘vote for me’.
But there’s more to it. The instructions on a packet of medicine must persuade you of their authority. The author of a novel must persuade you to keep turning pages, rather than scrolling TikTok. Even the writer of a sign saying, ‘Keep off the grass’ needs to persuade you there’s an invisible ‘…or else.’
So that’s what this Substack is about. Persuasive writing in all its forms. In advertising and politics, in literature and culture, and anywhere else I can think of. I’ll be exploring the tools of effective persuasion, the psychology of what works and what doesn’t, and – most broadly – what makes humans change their mind.
If that sounds like something you’re interested in, go ahead and do what needs to be done with the ‘Subscribe’ button. This whole process is going to be a learning curve for me, so if there’s anything you think I should read, watch, or investigate more, please post it in the comments.
Next week: Respect or charm - What’s most convincing?