Argument and Persuasion: Real World Writers
Jeffrey Goodby
I work in a business where persuasion is not usually welcome. The process is not necessarily a welcome one. And a lot of advertising people, I think, approach that and try to solve that problem, by repeating things, by talking down to people, by reducing everything to the lowest common denominator. And I think that what we try to do here is to raise things to the highest common denominators.

Helen Gillmor
An attorney who is speaking to a jury with respect to the facts has two burdens, he has to stay within the law as I haven't given it, but he has 12 people who are not lawyers to persuade.

Kim Stanley Robinson
Fiction is a… is social action. You can just put it as a straight equivalence there. That the writing of a story and you're telling it to other people, or giving it to other people is a social act that will then influence their opinions of what's going on in their own lives.

Rush Limbaugh
Key to my persuasive technique, is, I've learned through the partisanship and the rancor that has become politics, that if you are talking with somebody with whom you disagree, and you're just convinced they're wrong as they can be, you know they're wrong, the worst thing to do is get in their face, figuratively or literally, point a finger at 'em, tell them, you're wrong, you don't know what you're talking about, all you're going to do is steel their resolve to resist you.

Richard Aregood
I think what you need to do is say one thing. And say it hard, and maybe repeat it. But basically you don't want to go chasing off after something else in the middle of it. You have to maintain a momentum.

Robinson
You have this natural armory of abilities to argue, persuade, etc. Just from life and talking. And then professors are basically asking you for your thoughts on things and are saying to you, "I as a teacher am willing to accept that your thoughts on these matters are important and I'm gonna read them very closely, very analytically and I'm gonna try to give you my thoughts back on your thoughts."

Michael Bertsch
Writing the Urge to Action paper, you have to disarm the fear in the reader. You can't make them be afraid of you because they won't change their point of view, or their behaviors to reflect what you've written. You have to cajole them in some way. You don't want to suck up to 'em, but you want to entice them, that's better, you wanna entice them into your point of view. You want to bait them with something that they agree with, and bring them slowly in at a certain moment they won't realize that your opinions have closed around behind them and you've got them in your nice warm little arms of rhetoric here.

Kalle Lasn
But I do see everything that we do as being a kind of a contest with the audience. I see it like a battle of the mind, where there's some people there in a certain frame of mind, and here I have a chance to grab their attention for 30 seconds. We are actually making the audience watch themselves. So we are actually teasing the audience, or I'd say, more than teasing, I think we're actually pointing a finger at the audience and saying, "hey, are you like this?"

["THE PRODUCT IS YOU" EXAMPLE]

Lasn
How do I engage in this battle of the mind with the audience in such a way that after the battle is over, they will have changed a little bit.