Introducing Persuasive Writing

11 Março 2019, 10:00 • Hilda Alexandra Prazeres Eusebio

Today, students learned about the many different uses of persuasive writing and its different techniques.
Persuasive writing/speaking is all about getting someone to do something that you want them to do.

Situations where we use Persuasive Writing:

• courtrooms (Agree with me!  Choose my side!)
• academic/political debates (Agree with me!  Choose my side!)
• religious sermons (Join my Church! Follow its rules!)
  
• political speeches (Give us your money/your vote!)
• charities (Give us your money!)
• advertising (Buy our product! Give us your money!)
• job intervies/personal statements  (Give me the job!)
  
• the military (Join!  Give us your lives!)
• online dating profiles (Choose me!  Love me!)
• etc.

We then learned about 20 different persuasive writing/speaking techniques (there are more, but twenty is a nice round number):

1. Personal Pronouns
   
2. Cause and effect
   
3. Verb tenses
   
4. Repetition
   
5. Alliteration
   
6. The Power of Three
   
7. Emotive language
   
8. Facts and statistics
   
9. Hyperbole
   
10. Exaggeration
11. Technical Language
    
12. Rhetorical Questions
    
13. Dare the reader to disagree
    
14. Powerful verbs and strong adjectives
    
15. Listing.
    
16. Address objections.
    
17. Go tribal.
    
18. Story telling/anecdotes
    
19. Humour.
    
20. Reasons why.

We then listened to Winston Churchill's We Shall Fight on the Beaches speech and analyzed it, identifying the techniques within the text.  Please note that sometimes up to three (or even four) techniques might be used at the same time in a single sentence.  If you missed class, you should listen to it at home and follow along with the text in the course book (as Winston's accent is really hard to understand).