Persuasive Writing

Pete Frederick has spent the past 10 years as a professional persuasive writer. He is currently the senior bid writing expert for Pera Innovation, a leading research and development consultancy. He provides training, guidelines and internal evaluation to around 50 writers both within Pera and across other research organisations in Europe. Over the past 3 years, he has written and evaluated successful research bids worth EUR67m. His guidelines and training courses have contributed to writers securing projects worth over EUR200m over the same period.

Contents
Introduction
Section 1: What is Persuasive Writing?      
Why are you writing?   
Who is your audience? 
Reader Response = Result       
Section 2: Tools for Persuasive Writing      
Ethos, Logos, Pathos   
Using emotive language
You, We, I – getting personal  
Storytelling      
Persuasive writing example       
Section 3: Persuasion – Beyond Logic        
The science of decision-making
Primacy – why coming first matters
Availability       
Consistency and why we hate changing our minds
Justification and evidence
Simplicity
Loss and reward – a bird in the hand…
Outside influences – following the herd
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
Anchoring – decision-making all at sea
The Halo Effect
Recency – the here and now
The reader is always right
Commercial Break: Advertisement Slogans
Section 4: Conciseness Equals Clarity
Ason and the Jargonauts
Sentence length
The writer’s diet – cutting padding
Culling lazy words
Examples, similes and analogies
A 7-step concise writing process
Section 5: Verbs Equal Vigour
Grammar refresher
Verbs just wanna have fun
Verbs in disguise – noun suffixes
Section 6: Mistakes  
Commonly confused words      
Using the wrong word  
Scattershot punctuation and no punctuation      
Poor spelling    
‘Mistakes’ that aren’t mistakes 
Section 7: Planning and Structuring 
Plan, Draft, Edit           
Document structures    
Section 8: Layout, Fonts and Formatting    
Font choice     
Layout 
Headings         
Bullets 
Tables and diagrams    
Section 9: Tips for Common Documents     
More effective emails   
Writing for the web      
Persuasive CVs           
Executive summaries and abstracts       
Grant funding   
Feedback, fear and a favour    
Section 10: Persuasion – the Dark Arts      
Assume causality         
It’s common sense, stupid        
It’s common knowledge           
Abuse statistics
Widen or narrow definitions
Flattery will get you everywhere           
And a few more…       
The End         
Appendix 1: Summary of rules 
Appendix 2: Supersized words and their alternatives     
Appendix 3: Recommended reading     
Appendix 4: Persuasive writing flowchart