Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019
Play on feelings
Winning people over
One day I got a note from Alex Williams, a Style reporter, saying that his brother-in-law, Paul Kalanithi, had been diagnosed with cancer and wanted to submit an article. I didn’t expect much, but I would always read something sent by a colleague. Being polite to your colleagues is always the right thing to do.
When I received the essay, I knew that it was a nearly perfect piece of writing. Kalanithi, a doctor in his mid-thirties, wrote about discovering he had widespread lung cancer; because of his training, he could look at his scans and see that he likely had little time left to live. He was used to looking at images and then having to deliver difficult news to patients—not to looking at images of his own body and seeing that he was dying. I felt stupid writing back that I “really liked” his piece. I don’t think I captured my sadness at what he was going through and my admiration for him as a writer.
I made minor edits. Without being maudlin, he used his essay to connect to the universal fear of death and argued that we all need to live fully while we can. Paul was so helpful and calm in the editing and fact-checking, which had to have been difficult when you’re about to announce to the world that you have terminal cancer. His piece was exceedingly popular. Before he died, he wrote most of a book about his experience as doctor and patient. The book, When Breath Becomes Air (2016), was finished by his wife after his death and became a bestseller.
If you want to be persuasive, you have to connect to your audience emotionally. It doesn’t matter whether you’re encouraging someone to live fully and find meaning, like Dr. Kalanithi, or selling a service or a point of view on something as mundane as taxes.
Let’s say you’ve done your research. With an understanding of the audience you are trying to reach, you sit down to write what you are sure will be a powerful plea about whatever it is that has moved you—how to deal with the spread of fires on a hotter planet, maybe, or the unfairness of giving athletes preference in college admissions. It’s not a personal story; still, you do need to understand how to play to feelings, how to manipulate your audience.
I suppose that sounds crass. But persuasion is manipulation, a basic truth that should not alarm you. If you understand what people love, hate, relish, and fear, you can reach them by stirring up their feelings and then affirming them.
Articles that touch our feelings are often among the most popular on news sites, and they are more often shared on social media. Sometimes those articles connect with some frustration that people experience; other times, they arouse warmth and sentiment.
Just ask the best advertisers. The subway advertising campaign for the restaurant delivery app Seamless is funny, arch, and completely understands the emotions of New Yorkers, who are reading the ads while underground, frustrated with delays and overcrowding, and eager to get home. Among the Seamless taglines: “Wait for a table? You won’t even wait for a walk sign,” and “Over 8 million people in NYC and we help you avoid them all.”
Unabashedly sentimental is the viral ad “Friends Furever,” which Google made to market its Android phone. It shows different kinds of animals in unexpected pairings—a dog and an elephant, a baby rhinoceros and a sheep—playing and hanging out together. You remember it and want to share it because it makes you happy and grateful to be alive.
Anger is another powerful feeling that can be tapped. In a New York Times essay, the writer Kim Brooks told the story of how she was arrested for endangering her child merely because she left the child in the car while she ran into a store to pick something up. To any woman familiar with the struggle to do a job, take care of children, and make a home, the idea that a woman could be expected to do all three without ever needing to leave her children for even a minute was infuriating.
If you can arouse feelings in a reader or viewer, then you can have influence. Some writers mistakenly crush feelings from their essays in an attempt to be taken seriously. I remember hearing from a writer who was talking about the disrespect bordering on racism that his fellow Germans had shown toward the Greeks, who at that time were suffering from financial problems that threatened to harm the European Union. His pitch for the article was full of passion and feeling, but much of that had disappeared by the time we received his work. We urged him to restore the emotion, and he did, because his feelings about his countrymen were a way of involving us in the argument and making it stand out among the many articles on that crisis.
Feelings do far more than help us engage with articles, speeches, and books. They drive our rational conclusions, in the sense that the conclusions are just an excuse to justify the feelings. Influential research looking at how people make decisions, done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, exposed the myth that people make choices in a fully rational way. Many of our financial choices illustrate that, as do our electoral ones. Often in elections, people follow their feelings and only later come up with reasons for their actions and beliefs. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump masterfully played on people’s feelings, on their need to vent their anger over changes in society. Thanks to those feelings, some voters ended up supporting a man whose policies wouldn’t benefit them. Trump pushed lots of positive messages—Make America Great Again—but his underlying tactic was to arouse the feelings of people who felt marginalized and bypassed by other races, other countries, and by women, and to affirm the validity of those feelings.
Maybe their desire for a powerful dad and a strong, decisive leader prompted such people to vote for someone who would later do nothing for them. But it wasn’t rationality that guided them; it was their feelings. Psychologists call these mental shortcuts heuristics—the rules we use to quickly make decisions, even on complex matters. The trouble is, those heuristics that we use to get through a day also sometimes lead us to do illogical, irrational things.
Sometimes the strong feelings that come through in your piece and create its voice will help you get published because the editor knows that feeling and is moved. I remember getting an article from the travel writer Paul Theroux about the damage done to the American South after U.S. companies abandoned those states for cheaper labor in China. Theroux was upset that the rich chief executives who had approved those moves then wanted to turn around and “help” the poor. I responded to his passion because it lifted his story above others that might have said the same thing in a dry, analytical way.
Emotional stories get the most distribution on social media. Feelings are central to popular entertainment as well. One of my favorite scenes in a television show was in This Is Us, which provided a master class on how to play on feelings. The dad, Jack, can’t afford the car he wants for his wife and three young children. He asks the salesman if they can talk privately in his office, where Jack proceeds to spin out how he sees his family in the future in that car, how their lives unfold, and packs the story with sentiment and feeling. It’s not surprising when the car salesman figures out a way to help Jack. He connected; he feels it; he wants to help. And of course the scene is funny because it reverses the usual practice of the car salesman trying to talk a customer into a car by exploiting his feelings.
Sometimes, you can write in a way that engages feelings even though the words aren’t openly emotional. Jerry Saltz, a Pulitzer Prize—winning art critic, wrote an article for New York magazine looking back at the time in his life when he worked as an artist, not a critic. I suspect that Saltz, just in writing about how it felt to make art and then give it up, was emotionally reaching the many thousands of young people who arrive in New York determined to be successful in some kind of art form—theater, writing, dancing, painting. He wrote about his feeling of being driven, of being captured by the need to do it, and finally, about being unable to continue. He was blunt and made his feelings of failure clear.
Although you can reach people by arousing feelings of sadness, pain, and sorrow, we are all inherently optimistic, and it is worth remembering that. Our optimism endures even when we encounter facts that would seem to call for reevaluating the situation. In a study led by Tali Sharot at University College London, nineteen volunteers were asked to estimate their chances of experiencing eighty different bad events in the future—things like getting Alzheimer’s or being robbed. As the study participants responded to questions, the researchers scanned their brains with an MRI. Afterward, Sharot and her research team showed participants the actual statistical likelihood of bad things happening to them. Then participants were again asked to estimate their likelihood of experiencing those bad events. This time the researchers found that participants tended to revise their estimates to make them more positive when the information pointed that way, but did not make them more negative when the facts clearly suggested that they ought to be. The study participants also overestimated how long they were likely to live. The MRIs showed that their brains simply ignored the bad news. Strikingly, even those who were pessimistic about the world were optimistic about their own lives.
Because most of us are more optimistic than realistic, we tend to underestimate the chances of things like losing our jobs, getting divorced, or being diagnosed with cancer. Being optimistic—or slightly in denial—is an evolutionary advantage. It makes us psychologically able to keep venturing into the world, taking risks, and believing in the future. (But it also makes us a bit stupid about things we ought to do, like saving for retirement and scheduling unpleasant medical tests like colonoscopies.) If you were perpetually worried about dangers and threats, it would be hard to function. The secret is to be alert but not immobilized: all of us can learn from Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, whose characters are so loath to face reality that they are frozen and must watch passively as their family legacy is lost.
In your persuasive writing, remember that scaring people and being negative does not generally agree with our fundamental natures. We are hardwired for optimism, so we generally respond better to positive messages than negative ones. People didn’t stop smoking only because they were scared. They also stopped because quitting became a stylish thing to do, and they wanted to be like their nonsmoking friends.
Shame and fear have too often been the tools of the environmental movement in its efforts to change behavior. Giving people depressing information hasn’t worked. It just feels threatening. It is easy to distance yourself from something like that, to push it away and focus on your day-to-day life. The long term is just too abstract. In the book What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming (2015), the Norwegian psychologist Per Espen Stoknes writes that people don’t want to hear repeatedly about doom, particularly when there is no clear enemy. Those who are trying to get action around climate change need to balance threats with solutions and personal messages. People need to hear about steps we can take to deal with the warming world. Other writers have made similar arguments. In one study, several psychologists recruited people online and then asked them to choose between environmentally friendly and environmentally unfriendly options—for example, buying refrigerators that used less energy. As people chose, some saw a sentence on the computer that said, “Keep in mind that you might feel proud about your decisions.” Others saw this instead: “Keep in mind that you might feel guilty about your decisions.” In most of the scenarios, those who thought about pride, or got the pride reminder, were more likely to choose appliances that helped the environment. People need to hear something positive. We don’t want to feel guilty or hopeless.
In your writing or talking, if you can put people in an optimistic mood, they are more likely to hear you. Fear is strong, but so is hope. Fund-raisers for charities have learned that lesson. Those that emphasize happy transformations—even when raising money for somewhat grim situations—do better. Nike doesn’t tell people to exercise because if they don’t they will die, but instead uses stories about people who have transformed their lives—amputees running marathons, octogenarians swimming, and the like. When charities offer a sense of hope, donations go up. Books about the Holocaust that are set in the camps don’t sell well, while those that show something positive—like a Christian who rescued Jews, as in The Zookeeper’s Wife (2007) or Schindler’s List (1982)—appeal to people’s desire for a happy ending. Even the devastating story of Anne Frank, one of my favorite books as a child, was rooted in a positive outlook. It was set in the world of her mind, not in a concentration camp.
So, in your writing, understand the human bias in favor of being affirmative and positive. Make more positive statements than negative statements when you are trying to reach people, because they will be more likely to absorb that information. In your efforts to persuade, stay away from depressing images and crying people. It’s not effective to shame people, to make them feel guilty, to bait them or make fun of them. We all want inspiration.