Persuade People with Your Writing

Write copy, emails, letters, reports and plans to get the results you want

Karen Mannering

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781444176766
• eBook ISBN: 9781444176995
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Habilidades de escritura y presentación

The ability to persuade people to agree with you can be crucial to your working life. This book will help you apply the psychology of persuasion to your writing. Persuasion expert Karen Mannering guides you through all aspects of business writing, from adverts to business plans, emails to Twitter Feeds, and letters to reports to produce sharper and more productive copy through the power of persuasion.

1

Breaking Through the Myth Barrier

Goal – To break through our misconceptions regarding writing persuasive copy.

Diagnostic test

Answer each question by choosing a number from 1 to 5. Nearer to 1 indicates that you feel this statement to be false or incorrect and nearer to 5 indicates that you feel it is more likely to be true.

People try to avoid sales people

Sales people are bad people

By being able to write persuasively I am tricking people

People won’t like me if I seem to get what I want

I don’t need writing techniques because I can get by on my own

Everybody already has what they need so I am wasting time introducing anything else

If I use ‘sales talk’ people will see through me

If I am good at my job I shouldn’t need to persuade anyone to do anything – they will just trust my judgement

Genuine and honest people don’t use persuasive writing techniques

If my attempt at using persuasive writing techniques is successful, I have cheated

Now add up your score and see what it says about you.

Result

35–50	You are afraid of using these techniques because you feel they will reflect badly on you. Every product or service you buy has, in some way, been sold to you by advertising copy – even the magazine or newspaper you buy has been designed to appeal to you. Does the editor feel bad about this? No! They are in a competitive market, where only the best survive – as are you! This chapter will help you to overcome your concerns or fears and help you to reframe how you see the role of persuasion marketing in your life. All work has some form of sales element. If you are not working with that correctly, there is a real possibility of you holding yourself back and not achieving as much as you could.
20–34	You have some mixed feelings about using persuasive writing. Perhaps you feel it is necessary but still fear that you don’t want to be caught doing it? It pays to remember that people do not always know what is available to them and therefore it is your job to guide their attention to a service or product that can make their life easier. You are helping others to achieve their goals by making the outcomes and benefits more obvious. This chapter will help you to explore your personal fears and realize that persuasive writing is not an indictment of you as a person, but a skill that you can learn and practise, to gain better results in life.
Below 20	You understand fully that sales people are not ‘bad’ and that everyone has problems that need solutions. However, you can have the most amazing solution in the world but nobody will take notice until they are persuaded to listen. As persuasive writers, we need to use our skills to enable readers to access those solutions. This chapter will help you to understand how others may see the role of persuasive writing and will therefore help you to clarify your own thoughts on the subject.

Successful persuasive writing can spark extreme interest and excitement in some people and extreme concern in others. For some, it is the key to unlock the door to winning sales letters and increased returns – but to others it may spell manipulation and coercion.

Try it now

Ask approximately ten people you know how they feel about persuasive writing and whether their thoughts would change if they were able to write more persuasively themselves.

If you undertook the above action you are likely to find that most people like the idea of being able to persuade other people but don’t like the idea of being persuaded themselves! Why is this? Probably because, if you felt you had been persuaded to undertake some action, then it automatically cannot be the action you would have chosen to take, can it? Surely there must have been some mind control, mesmerism or hypnosis involved? They fear that their own free will has been removed from them and some trickery has been introduced. This results in instant suspicion and causes the person to attempt to distance themselves from the source as far as possible, when in fact nothing can be further from the truth.

But what about if you are only persuading them to do the very thing they were going to do anyway? In this situation you are surely only speeding up the decision that they were going to take. Consider this: if someone is reading a magazine on cookery, I think we can assume that they are interested in cookery and probably had every intention of cooking something from the magazine at some point in their life. Therefore a writer using persuasive writing within the magazine to highlight an offer is not really taking advantage of you in a weak situation. Let’s take this example further: if someone walks into a showroom displaying new cars I think it fair to assume that they probably are at least a little interested in buying a new car (after all, it is not a thing we do just because we have time on our hands). Therefore, if the sales professional hands them some advertising copy about the car and attempts to speak to them about it, I think we can take the view that they are trying to help them by bringing the inevitable purchase forward, and in the long run, waste less of their time.

Try it now

Reflect on how many times you have wasted time simply procrastinating and pondering on a decision that, in the back of your mind, you know you are going to take anyway. (For example, have you ever seen an item of clothing you liked, did not make the decision and then had to go back the next day to buy it – even though it meant rushing off after work or back into town?) How many hours of your life could have been saved had someone just encouraged you to take action in the first place?

Your fear of being ‘sold to’ may seem completely logical to you but it actually says less about the power of the writer than about how you feel about yourself. Do you really feel that you have no self-will to refuse offers and ideas that you do not want? Of course not! It is just a myth that persuasive writing has some kind of power over us. The truth is that sometimes we need that little nudge to take an action that we were going to take anyway, but felt we needed more evidence.

Remember this

Persuasive writing is not simply about selling. It is helping the reader to have confidence to buy the object or service that they were probably going to buy anyway.

Authors use persuasive writing all the time to engage us with their characters. Haven’t you felt so sucked into a story that you simply must put other tasks aside so that you can finish it?

While we are myth-busting, let’s look at some other myths that get in the way of us producing great persuasive writing:

‘Everyone will think badly of me…’

At the very centre of our being we all love to be liked.

Try it now

What does ‘being liked’ mean to you? Make a list of the signs that show you how much you are liked.

You may have had difficulty undertaking that activity because even admitting that we look for the signs that we are liked can feel uncomfortable. How many of the items you wrote down are about how you feel about yourself and how many are attributed to the feelings and approbation of others? We cannot have any control over the feelings ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Dedication
• Title
• Acknowledgements
• Contents 
• Meet the Author and Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Breaking Through the Myth Barrier
• 2 The New Truths
• 3 Having a Focus and an Endgame
• 4 Techniques that Work
• 5 Persuasive Language
• 6 Writing to Motivate
• 7 Presenting a Cohesive Argument
• 8 Producing Sales Copy
• 9 Using Persuasive Techniques on the Web
• 10 Using Persuasive Techniques at Work
• Further Reading
• Helpful Contacts
• Copyright