Persuasive Writing

Pete Frederick has spent the past 10 years as a professional persuasive writer. He is currently the senior bid writing expert for Pera Innovation, a leading research and development consultancy. He provides training, guidelines and internal evaluation to around 50 writers both within Pera and across other research organisations in Europe. Over the past 3 years, he has written and evaluated successful research bids worth €67m. His guidelines and training courses have contributed to writers securing projects worth over €200m over the same period.

Contents

Introduction

Section 1: What is Persuasive Writing?      

Why are you writing?   

Who is your audience? 

Reader Response = Result       

Section 2: Tools for Persuasive Writing      

Ethos, Logos, Pathos   

Using emotive language

You, We, I – getting personal  

Storytelling      

Persuasive writing example       

Section 3: Persuasion – Beyond Logic        

The science of decision-making

Primacy – why coming first matters

Availability       

Consistency and why we hate changing our minds

Justification and evidence

Simplicity

Loss and reward – a bird in the hand…

Outside influences – following the herd

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

Anchoring – decision-making all at sea

The Halo Effect

Recency – the here and now

The reader is always right

Commercial Break: Advertisement Slogans

Section 4: Conciseness Equals Clarity

Ason and the Jargonauts

Sentence length

The writer’s diet – cutting padding

Culling lazy words

Examples, similes and analogies

A 7-step concise writing process

Section 5: Verbs Equal Vigour

Grammar refresher

Verbs just wanna have fun

Verbs in disguise – noun suffixes

Section 6: Mistakes  

Commonly confused words      

Using the wrong word  

Scattershot punctuation and no punctuation      

Poor spelling    

‘Mistakes’ that aren’t mistakes 

Section 7: Planning and Structuring 

Plan, Draft, Edit           

Document structures    

Section 8: Layout, Fonts and Formatting    

Font choice     

Layout 

Headings         

Bullets 

Tables and diagrams    

Section 9: Tips for Common Documents     

More effective emails   

Writing for the web      

Persuasive CVs           

Executive summaries and abstracts       

Grant funding   

Feedback, fear and a favour    

Section 10: Persuasion – the Dark Arts      

Assume causality         

It’s common sense, stupid        

It’s common knowledge           

Abuse statistics

Widen or narrow definitions

Flattery will get you everywhere           

And a few more…       

The End         

Appendix 1: Summary of rules 

Appendix 2: Supersized words and their alternatives     

Appendix 3: Recommended reading     

Appendix 4: Persuasive writing flowchart