The heart of persuasion
How advocacy work has expanded my understanding of the art of persuasive writing.
Before we get to today’s writing lesson, I would like to share a personal story with you.
When my youngest daughter was diagnosed with an impossibly rare genetic condition after a sudden cardiac arrest at age 2, I was thrust into a new world.
The world of being a “medical mom.”
I had known other medical moms, and their plight looked terrifying to me. To constantly worry about your child, to fear making the smallest misstep, to have to make life-or-death decisions every single day … How did they do it? How did they survive it?
I would soon find out.
We brought our daughter home from the ICU with a scar on her sternum where they’d opened her up and placed a medical device on her heart — and she was suddenly a different child.
Just ten days prior, she was a raucous toddler who went through life like she had a jetpack built in. Now, she was a 30-pound infant, unable to speak or sit up on her own.
I’m happy to say that she recovered most of her motor skills quickly. And she never lost her fighting spirit, or her sweet smile. But her new, incurable and life-limiting diagnosis of PPA2 changed how our family operated from the ground up. Assessing food ingredients and germ exposure, helping her up and down stairs, and getting her to and from specialist appointments became a full-time job.
Children’s Hospital of Colorado has been our partner through it all. So when their PR team reached out and asked if we would consider being interviewed by the media to bring attention to the work they’re doing in pediatric cardiology and genetic disease research, it was an easy yes for me (maybe not such an easy yes for the rest of my family members).
I transitioned again from medical mom to advocate.
Through that media attention, other PPA2 families around the world found us and reached out. They had begun circling their wagons, creating a small-but-mighty group to support each other, and they invited us to join. We eagerly jumped in.
In the last three years, more PPA2 families found our group … and more children were lost to this disease.
And in that time, some of us have begun to feel a greater urge to advocate more aggressively for PPA2 research. None of us have much time or money to spare — after all, we’re medical parents — so we’ve begun to pool our skills and resources to create a formal advocacy group. Our hope is that it may eventually evolve into a nonprofit foundation, and we can begin to raise funds for the research ourselves.
Personally, I’m donating my communication skills to the cause. I’m currently editing the outreach letters our members are writing to research groups, adding in the persuasive elements to convince these groups they should include our children in their research.
In all my years of being a professional writer, most of what I did was persuade people. And now, so many years into my career, I’m just now really seeing all the different ways these persuasive writing skills can be leveraged.
I’m just now seeing what a difference I can make with them.
Which brings me to today’s writing lesson.
You don’t have to have a sad story to make your writing more persuasive.
You just have to have a heart.
What is at the heart of persuasive writing?
In my everyday life, I write content for technology companies. I persuade their audiences to pay attention, take action and buy a product.
In my life as an author, I persuade readers to take a chance on my books.
In my PPA2 advocacy, I am persuading harried researchers to consider a new group of candidates for their drug trials, and persuading biomedical executives to expand their genetic research programs.
But in all these different areas, with all the different topics, I’m really doing the same thing:
I’m trying to connect emotionally with the reader.
I try to understand the reader’s reality — their state of mind, focus and emotional state when they are likely to read what I wrote. I put myself in their shoes. And then I write to them in a way that moves their heart.
Because at the end of the day, whether you’re a software buyer or a romance reader or a genetic researcher, you’re making decisions with your heart, not your brain.
We humans with our big ol’ brains, we like to think that our logic takes point, that we think through our decisions.
But we don’t.
We make a decision with our heart, with our emotions, then we use logic to justify it.
So when you want to write something in service of persuasion — when you want to move someone to action — start with the heart.
Your audience can logically justify just about any decision their heart makes.
As for me, I’m appealing to the hearts of researchers, biomedical executives, and doctors in order to save my daughter’s heart. I can’t help but see the beauty in that.