10.3: Catch 'Em in the Act

Catch ’Em in the Act

To persuade is, technically, to move your audience to action. And to do it well, it pays to notice how you yourself are moved to actions by external forces. Because despite how set we humans are in our ways, we’re nonetheless constantly succumbing to the quietly effective arguments that come at us all day every day and implicitly move us to action, most of the time without our awareness.

So in this course and with this text, we’ll pay attention. How has this social media platform gotten me back on the app fifteen minutes after I closed it, vowing I wouldn’t open it again until morning? Why am I drinking this neon-blue beverage no human should rightly consider drinkable or watching thirty-one women fight for one man to marry in a period of weeks on my TV? Why am I voting for this person instead of that one or not voting at all? Why do I believe this should happen with guns and that should happen with vaccines? Did I just decide about these things of my own free will? (No.) Or did something quietly or not so quietly persuade me to do or think them? (Yes.)

If you enjoy being manipulated into believing and doing things you might not otherwise believe or do, things that are very often not in your best interest, then OK, great—you do you. Someone has to fall for Ponzi schemes and keep the cable news networks on air. But if you want to start spotting the subtle and insidious persuasion tactics bombarding you constantly and shaping your actions and reactions before you catch them in the act (if you ever do), then pay attention, because once again, you’ve come to the right place.

Learning how to persuade entails understanding how you are persuaded. That means understanding how these implicit forces work, how they necessarily play on your deeply held cultural values, often by merely reinforcing the unexamined assumptions you already hold. We must understand how those latent beliefs work, in ourselves and in the audiences we’re trying to convince, if we want to learn the art of persuasion.

Which is a fancy way of saying that in this writing class, we’re not just trying to recognize those savvy persuasion tactics; we’re looking to steal them. Well, at least the ethical and sound tactics. Our goal will always be to identify, isolate, and snatch the tools being used to persuade us and turn them back around to persuade them.

So the questions you should be asking yourself now, while there’s still time to practice, are these: When I am out there in the world trying to get a real person to shift their thinking subtly or simply to say yes instead of no, what works? What doesn’t? What is vital? What is a deal breaker? What will kill my request before it’s even made? And what brings it home?

I’m so glad you asked, because that’s precisely where our writing class comes in: a nice little class focused solely on teaching you to do that very thing and nothing else.

No eight-page analysis of chapter 14 of The Catcher in the Rye, no two-thousand-word explication of a single sonnet, just, can you move that gatekeeper to the action you want to move them toward or not? Can you build an ethical, well-supported argument that evokes the necessary emotion at just the right time with just the right tone and style and support and logic to make the thing happen, or will you stay in that dead-end job until you die?