Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

Coda: Go forth!

In writing this book, I have read lots of studies on persuasion. And interestingly, many of them presented in a structured way what I had come to see experientially and anecdotally in my work as an editor.

But sometimes, the sheer weight of so many experts talking about the challenge of persuasion left me demoralized. Were all those long days in Op-Ed worth it? Can you change people’s minds?

So one day, while thinking about that question, I called Alexander Coppock, an assistant professor of political science at Yale. He had recently done a study on something near to my heart and experience: He wanted to know whether op-eds made any difference at all—were they worth all the time and, indirectly, the money that went into them? Coppock had designed an online study that surveyed thousands of people, dividing them into a control group and one “treated” with op-eds. He found that those who read the op-ed material were more likely to agree with the author’s perspective than those who did not read it.

He says no one really knows what makes people change their minds—he and his collaborators from the Cato Institute simply found that people were influenced, not why. Both Republicans and Democrats changed in equal measure, agreeing with the author by about 5 to 10 percentage points more after reading the article. The “treatment” with written ideas didn’t produce radical changes, like converting a Democrat into a Republican, but the changes were measurable and sustained.

I have faith in the power of persuasion, mainly because I have seen so much positive change over my life. Engaging with the world, whether through writing or in person, is what the world is, what life is. I hope these chapters have given you the inspiration and the confidence to go out and write. It’s satisfying to pull together your thoughts and share them. We are all in this together, and our words connect us in the most primal and profound way.