Jane Tinkler (Nine Dots Prize)

Welcome to this podcast – the next in our series that we hope will support and inspire anyone who’s getting ready to enter the Nine Dots Prize – or who just wants to think about how to make their writing more effective.   

I’m Jane Tinkler, Senior Manager for the Prize. 

In this podcast we’ll be exploring something which every writer hopes to do – write persuasively and convince readers of their argument.

 

Philip Collins

There’s a persuasive function in almost everything we write – all the way down to an email we write to colleagues – and the techniques of persuasion are very similar in all these cases.

Eva Wolfangel

Of course the first thing you need to persuade your audience is to read your article or to listen to your radio feature or to read your blogpost or whatever.  Because my main focus is to help society to find out what to do now in order to have a good future, it’s important to persuade them to take action.

Onjali Raúf

I am definitely trying to open eyes and trying to open minds as to the reality of the refugee situation.  The reactions that I’ve seen from children who have read this book – to see them want to go forward and do something about it is one of the biggest eye openers of my life.

 

Jane

We’ve asked these three successful writers to share their ideas and advice.  Between them they cover a wide range of writing – but they all have plenty of hints and tips on how to make your writing more persuasive.

Philip Collins

My name is Philip Collins and I’m a speechwriter.  I cut my teeth as the chief speechwriter to the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, which I did for three years.  And after that I then set up a company writing speeches, called The Draft.  And I’ve also written two books on speeches – one which is a manual on how to do it better and the other which is an anthology and an analytical treatment of some of the greatest speeches ever written.  And that’s called, ‘When They Go Low, We Go High,’ which is a wonderful phrase which was used by Michelle Obama.

Eva Wolfangel  

So my name is Eva Wolfangel, or in English it’s Wolf Angel, which is much nicer.  And I am a Nine Dots Board member, and besides that I am a freelance tech and science journalist, and I’m based in Germany.   I write mostly for magazines and the newspapers – most of them are German or Swiss.  Sometimes I produce radio features and I write in the internet of course.  We founded our own platform for freelance journalists, called Riff Report, it’s riffreporter.de. My focus is on digitisation and ethics, human computer interaction, robots, AI and all those topics.  My main question, besides the innovation itself, is always, what do we have to decide now as a society that this technology will be used for good and that it will be a good thing for our future?

Onjali Raúf

My name is Onjali Raúf- I am a children’s author and a human rights and women’s rights activist.  I have three books that have been published so far – so ‘The Boy At The Back of the Class’ is centred around the refugee crisis – it starts with a boy who walks into a very ordinary UK classroom, it transpires he is a refugee who has survived the wars of Syria. ‘ The Star Outside My Window’ features a young girl called Aniyah and Noah, and a quest to find the truth behind what’s happened to a very special person in their life.  And ‘The Night Bus Hero’ centres around a bully called Hector, who is the narrator, and a homeless man called Thomas.  All of my books touch upon a subject that I am passionate about – human rights and in particular women’s and refugee rights – because those are the two fields that I work in.  So I do lots of other writing – writing letters to MPs, to lobbying groups, trying to write persuasive reasons for positive action being taken on behalf of vulnerable members of our society – so all forms of writing.

 

Jane

Probably the first type of persuasion that any writer has to master – is the ability to convince someone that they want to read your book in the first place.  That the experience is going to bring them pleasure or inform them or be useful – hopefully all of those things.   

Philip Collins

You have to entice readers in – readers will come in but you’ve got to kind of keep them.  So having an interesting opening, an opening that lays out the book, and makes people want to come is not unlike writing a comedy script.  And the essential rule of writing a stand-up comedy routine is, put your best joke first.  Leave your second-best joke to last – because you want a good pay off, you want to go out with a bang.  But you’ve got to get them straight away.  So get your best material up front – and you need to do something like that in any kind of writing – you’ve got to put it in the shop window.   

 

Jane

And once you’ve enticed your readers in, how do you keep them interested and win them over to your message?  Our experts have lots of ideas. Let’s start by hearing from Onjali.

Onjali Raúf

I try to make my writing as persuasive as possible, no matter which form, by trying to put across the reality of a situation that the audience might not really understand or might not have access to.  So, for example, a letter to an MP who I’m trying to persuade to help child refugees be reunited with their families, I will go at it from a personal angle – as to how would you feel if your children were suddenly out in the world and alone?  You’d want them to be with family.  Or if it’s from the perspective of a narrator in a story, it’s trying to put across different characters’ experiences of the world.   So it always starts from the personal and trying to make sure that the person who is the recipient of your words will understand what it is you’re trying to put across. 

 

Jane

And for Eva too – the personal can be persuasive.

Eva Wolfangel

In my experience a good method to persuade people that this is a topic they should be interested in or that this is a topic that touches their life, is to tell them a story, a very personal story often about myself, things that I experienced when I for example tried out that technology.  I think personal stories are more persuasive because people either recognise themselves in them, or they can really understand motivations and emotions behind actions.  It’s like if you read a good novel, you really feel you know these persons now, and that helps to understand what they are doing.  And I feel that helps my readers really to stay curious and to read the whole thing, because they want to find out what happened next.

 

Jane

One way to make your writing more convincing is to use images and metaphors that conjure up a vivid picture in your reader’s mind.   Let’s hear about one of the speeches that Philip analyses in his book – by one of the most inspirational speakers of the 20^th century.

Philip Collins

Martin Luther King’s greatest moment is 1963 and the March on Washington and the speech that has become known as ‘I Have A Dream.’

I have a dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed…

Philip Collins

Martin Luther King is speaking in an idiom which really comes from the churches.  His rhetoric is highly ornate and very biblical.  The great technique there is the use of emotion – that’s what’s really persuasive about it.  That beautiful, moving passage where he talks about the dream of a little white boy and a little black boy being able to hold hands and live together. 

… One day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers – I have a dream today…

Philip Collins

In that image of the two people coming together, the children, he tells us that we know this is not the case now.  And just think how much more effective it is to give you that image, than it would be to say, “America is divided between the black people and the white people, we need to bring them together.”   Using imagery is a much more effective way of evoking something than using abstract language.  We know from lots of research that people retain images for much longer than they do arguments.   Martin Luther King’s a master of that, so his speech is full of imagery, it’s full of places, it’s full of people. 

 

Jane 

Of course, Onjali is writing for probably the most challenging audience of all. 

Onjali Raúf

Children are definitely one of the most difficult audiences to write for – but they’re also the most fun.  I think one of the key ways of making a story persuasive is really making the characters persuasive, making them believable – creating an adventure and a series of characters that the reader wants to go on that journey with.  So if you have a story put in front of a child which gets them really inspired and gets them to want to see what this character does and where they go, that’s where the persuasion lies and that’s where you can really take a reader in, take a child in, take a grown up in, and make sure that what you’re trying to say gets through to them.

Jane

Let’s hear an example of how she engages her young readers.

Onjali Raúf

So the extract I’m about to read to you is from ‘The Boy at the Back of the Class’ – it’s at the end of the first chapter – where the narrator has spotted this young, pale boy who was about to be sat at the back of their classroom – and a thought that pops into their head…

I think it must be one of the worst things in the world to be new to a place and have to sit with people you don’t know.  Especially people that stare and scowl at you like Clarissa was doing.  I made a secret promise to myself right there and then that I would be friends with the new boy.  I happened to have some lemon sherbets in my bag that morning, and I thought I would try and give him one at break time.  And I would ask Josie and Tom and Michael if they would be his friends too.  After all, having four new friends would be much better than having none.  Especially for a boy who looked as scared and as sad as the one now sitting at the back of our class.

Onjali Raúf

I think that extract is particularly persuasive because you are immediately drawn to the character, the narrator, you are immediately taken in by their thoughts, you are immediately understanding of what it is they want to do, which in this case is to want to be a friend with a stranger.   All of those things I think make the narrator quite compelling, hopefully, and make you want to read on.

 

Jane

And what about Eva’s technique of using her personal experiences to make her writing persuasive?

Eva Wolfangel

In one article for example, that was about how artificial intelligence can detect everything, every emotion and our personality in our voice, I really just tried that out.  So I talked to a speech computer who did exactly this, and then this AI inside told me very personal things about myself.  And I just described that in the article…

I recently made a phone call with a voice computer for a quarter of an hour – a harmless chat – what my last weekend was – my last holiday – I didn’t talk about private things or anything that could make me angry, helpless or depressed.  And now the speech computer claims that I am very curious, eight out of nine possible points, tolerant eight points, sociable, willing to take risks, need autonomy, place little value on status or dominance, and not particularly balanced and not particularly well organised.  That’s frightening.  The algorithm is right in almost everything.  I feel like I have been caught.  When I later tell my husband about the results, when I report them to my colleagues over the following days, they answer, “Right Eva you are like this.”  How can that be?

Eva Wolfangel

And then of course I came to the problems that comes with it.  For example, that I don’t want an AI to know very personal things about myself and you never know who is behind this AI and knows these things in future as well.  I think in that case I made it persuasive just by really telling my personal story and how I really started the research.  And then quickly it became clear to me that I have to try it out and tell people how it worked for me.  And of course, that comes with telling people these personal things as well – like I’m not well organised.  Luckily it found out that I am curious and that of course fits to my job – that’s the reason why I am a journalist.  

 

Jane

Of course Philip was often writing speeches to be delivered to a large audience.  So it was important to be aware of just who the message was directed at. 

Philip Collins

I’ve got an extract from a speech, the last big speech that I did with Blair.  And this was the 2006 Labour Party Conference speech.  And the theme of this speech was, I think quite prophetic as it turns out.  It was about globalisation and it was about how the effects of globalisation are changing the way people live and changing the nature of the economy, and that if politics doesn’t respond to that, then there will be a populist backlash.  So this section is really directed at the Labour party.  The Labour party has historically been a party that’s better at losing than at winning.  And this was the message and it runs like this –

The beliefs of the Labour Party of 2006 should be recognisable to the

… members of 1906 – and they are – full employment, strong public services, tackling poverty, international solidarity.  But the policies shouldn’t.  And the trouble was, for a long time they were…

… always the same.  Values unrelated to modern reality are not just electorally hopeless, the values themselves become devalued.  They have no purchase on the real world.  We won, in the end not because we surrendered our values, but because we finally had the courage to be true to them.

Philip Collins

The important point about this passage is, it shows you how you’ve got to define your audience.  You need to know who you’re speaking to.  In a long piece of writing or a long speech, you won’t necessarily be talking to exactly the same people at every point in the passage.  But you’ve got to be in control of who your audience is.  You’ve got to understand what they think and that allows you to select the persuasive argument for them. 

 

Jane

And is it important for a writer to demonstrate passion and a commitment to their message?

Onjali Raúf

Oh to be persuasive as a writer I think you absolutely have to believe in the message that you’re trying to convey in your books.  I think children in particular are very astute when you’re not being honest, or you’re not being true to whatever it is that you’re writing about. So whether you’re writing something that’s really funny – you know, you have to find it funny.  If you’re writing about something that’s really tragic – you also have to see the tragedy in it.  So I think it’s really important for any author, to believe in what they’re writing, no matter – you know – what flight of fancy they’re riding on that day.  You have to be passionate about it, otherwise you won’t get to the end of the story I don’t think if you’re not.  Because I struggle – I always struggle midway – but the thing that keeps me going is knowing that I want this story out there and I want it to be listened to – so yes, absolutely, passion is the baseline.

Philip Collins

One of my favourite discoveries when I was researching the book is a leader from the Spanish Civil War called Dolores Ibarruri.  And she was known by all as La Pasionaria…

La Pasionaria speech in Spanish

…and La Pasionaria is a wonderful speaker – she’s magnetic, she’s brave – and she is intensely passionate – and she has this slogan, which is No Pasarán – they shall not pass.  And it’s almost like a call and answer thing she does with the audience.

La Pasionaria speech in Spanish

Passion is one of those things which you always want to demonstrate rather than talk about.  It’s very unpersuasive to say, I am passionate about… because it doesn’t sound very passionate.  It’s much more persuasive to simply be passionate, to just talk about the thing in question with great intensity. 

 

Jane

But beware your passion getting the better of you, your choice of words and style also needs to be convincing.

Eva Wolfangel

So what I like a lot is writing in the present tense.  To me it looks like in English articles this is something people don’t do too much, but I like it a lot to have stories in present tense and to feel as much as possible like you are beside and with this person they write about.  The present tense feels more direct to me, so I feel more like I am in this world right now and I am participating if it’s written in present tense.  What I think as well, what helps a lot, is just jumping into that story – if you really jump into the matter and don’t start with an introduction. 

 

Jane

And what can you do if you know your reader might have doubts about you or your message?  Let’s go back to the 16^th century as England faced the advance of the Spanish Armada.

Philip Collins

Elizabeth I exemplifies a very important principle about persuasion.   Elizabeth I confronts a big question and she doesn’t shy away from it.  The big question is that the Spanish Armada is coming and the nation is under threat.  And the thing that all of the military people are thinking, is that this woman, this queen, cannot be a viable commander of the armed forces.  It’s absurd, how can a woman do that job?  And rather than pretend they’re not thinking it, and rather than ignore the question, she absolutely confronts it.  She goes down to Tilbury to address them and she essentially states what’s in their heads.

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.

Philip Collins

And she’s essentially saying, how dare you suggest that I’m not capable of doing this job?  Absolutely I am, because I’m the monarch.   And she does it through rhetoric and she does it through something which is adaptable for all kinds of purposes.  Which is, if there’s a central argument that people are saying, if there’s something that people feel you’re vulnerable on or weak on – don’t pretend it’s not there.  Describe it exactly, describe it as your audience is thinking about it, and confront it and turn that weakness into a strength.  And Elizabeth I does that absolutely brilliantly.

 

Jane

Clearly Elizabeth the First couldn’t admit to having any doubts, but Eva considers that sometimes acknowledging that you don’t have all the answers can be just as effective.  

Eva Wolfangel

I think it’s even important to admit if you have doubts, that you have them, and I think that only makes you more authentic.  If people are too confident, I tend to be more critical, or not to believe them or to think more about what might be the problems or the holes in their argument, because it’s just not natural.  So for example I once wrote about how search engines influence the way you find thing and that things many people share and many people talk about of course are things you find, but the things not many people talk about just disappear completely.  And I think this is a problem, and this is what I told people, but I don’t know a solution for that.  Because if you turn that off, then you will find all kind of random things, but I’m sure you will find less of the things you are actually searching for.  And I think it’s important to admit if you don’t have a solution or if you’re just not sure about what to think about something, just to make clear – these are the challenges, these are the problems, these are the things that are good – and people can build their own opinion about that.

 

Jane

To end, a final tip from each of our writers.

 

Onjali Raúf

So my one tip to everyone who wants to write persuasively is to imagine yourself as the recipient of your piece of work.  So imagine yourself as the person needing to be persuaded – and I assure you, once you put yourself in another person’s shoes, who might have no idea what you’re talking about, might not have any empathy with what you’re trying to say, you will come up with something that will definitely  be persuasive.

Eva Wolfangel

In German we say you have to pick people up – I don’t know if you say it in English too.   So you have to take people from where they are and start with stories to show them why this is interesting even for them and even if they think this is nothing that has to do with their lives.  Because of course it has and they see, if you tell stories about people and their lives and their use of technology, they can get a feeling how their own future might feel.  And I think that’s the trick.

Philip Collins

The most important thing of all is to really take your time over your central proposition.  What, in a nutshell, are you trying to say?  And if you can’t get that proposition onto a post-it note, then you’re not ready to start yet.   It has to be something with which somebody – and somebody rational too – must be able to disagree.  Because if it isn’t, then it’s not a real statement.  It’s a platitude, it’ll be banal.   It’s helpful if you think, who disagrees with me and why?  And that should be part of the argument you’re having, because what you’re writing here is an argument.  If you’ve got that – then you can start to write persuasively.  

 

Jane

Now it’s your turn to get writing.  Our question for 2020 is:

What does it mean to be young in an ageing world?

We hope we’ve persuaded you to enter and we’re looking forward to receiving your entries.  The deadline is the 18^th of January, 2021.

We’d like to thank our writers, Philip Collins, Eva Wolfangel – who’ll be one of our judges – and Onjali Raúf, for their insights and words of advice.  And thanks also to Producer, Louise Adamson and all the team at Loftus Media.

And as someone who writes particularly for the young , Onjali seems a fitting voice to provide some final words of encouragement.

 

Onjali Raúf

For anyone who is seeking to write on this theme of being young in an ageing world and to write persuasively about it, again going back to my former answer, I think it’s passion.  You have to be passionate about what you’re saying, ensuring that the words that you’re putting on your paper, the words that you’re typing into your computer, are words that you would get behind  and that you believe in.  As long as you believe in what you’re writing,  I think you’ll have an amazing answer to the question.