Whether you’re writing an email, a letter to a friend, a blog post, or a page of website content on a business website, you want your message, or your idea, to get across to the other person the best way possible. Most communication involves some bit of persuasion. You can even call it selling.
Even outside of the business world, we must sell ourselves. We sell ourselves to a potential friend. We sell ourselves to our spouse... every day, particularly when we've done something wrong. We sell ourselves to our employer, to our children, even to our dog. We do it unconsciously, and pass it off as "personal communication," but it's personal selling.
In speech, we use actions like smiling to persuade the other person to like us, to receive out messages better, etc. In writing, we use persuasive writing to get others to be more receptive to our messages and ideas. That’s what we’ll look at in this post.
Many people think that persuasive writing needs superlatives, like “best”, “greatest” and “largest”. But that’s not the case. Research shows that people dislike excessive hype, sometimes called “marketese”. This is especially true of online material, as people mainly visit websites for information or to purchase goods and services.
Elements of persuasive writing
Objectivity. Be objective and specific and support what you say with evidence, such as facts, statistics or testimonials.
Credibility. People will believe you more readily if they think you’re credible. You can establish your credibility through various means, such as your personal qualifications and experience, your company reputation, your branding, testimonials, and writing simply and clearly.
Emotional appeal. We form our opinions on the basis of facts, intuition and prejudice. You can’t do much about prejudice, but you can convince people with facts and if you’re credible, you’ll appeal to their intuition as well.
10 Persuasive Writing Tips:
1. Think of your customer or client and what they want or need to know. Show that you understand their concerns. Sometimes you can do this by identifying a problem. If you’ve got the reader on-side and they agree there’s a problem, then your solution has a better chance of appealing to them.
2. Provide some information that your reader will agree with so they realize you understand their situation.
3. Suggest a benefit. People are interested in what’s in it for them.
4. Give your writing the “you” and “we” check. Often you can change the tone of your writing by the simple technique of using “you” instead of “we”.
5. Anticipate and answer objections.
6. Help people save face by acknowledging what they know is true and then providing more information so they can change their mind gracefully.
7. Be even-handed. If you are presenting possibilities, give all options a fair hearing and don’t leave out important information. If your reader finds out you’ve omitted key facts, you’ll lose credibility.
8. Write simply and clearly, using simple words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
9. Get the main information across upfront. People may not read through to the end, so grab their attention at the beginning with the most important information.
10. Use concise headings that give an indication of what’s to follow. Be witty, only if your heading is truly attention grabbing.
Persuasive writing is a good skill to have in this information age. These tips above should help you write more convincingly to your readers. It takes time and practice to write persuasively on every writing assignment – just apply the tips whenever you sit down to write and it will become second nature with time.
