League of Influence
Character, writing and the power of persuasion
Life is an endless stream of possibilities. From the moment humans wake, we must decide what to do next. Rise or snooze. Bathe or shower. Shoe or sandal. Fry or scramble. We daily make choices in the thousands, and to do so we weigh the relative merits of alternative actions. That is the process of decision-making.
Being gregarious animals, we live in societies of relationships, families, communities, nations and beyond. By nature, we are conspiratorial, literally breathing together. As such, every decision we make individually has some effect socially, even if subtle, and the downstream effects can be considerable. A politician watching polls close, like an accused seeing a jury withdraw to consider a verdict, knows full well the cumulative power of individual decisions.
Other people’s choices can have advantageous or distressing consequences for us. In such cases, the urge to manipulate their decisions in ways favorable to ourselves is powerful. It is often in our immediate self-interest to be persuasive.
To bend others to our will, we have a range of possible interventions. We can torture them until they submit, force them physically to comply, threaten them with disturbing consequences, bribe them with otherwise unattainable rewards, undermine their intellectual processes with brainwashing and peer pressure, plead with them to rate our ambitions above others’ and their own, or simply appeal to them in ways that lead to a reasoned choice in our favour.
Unless you maintain a private military regiment or have the backing of organized crime, you may have to rely on your ability to appeal to people’s reason and emotion to have anything go your way. Luckily, this is not difficult.
As you struggle to be persuasive, it might inspire you to reflect that hardly any human decisions are determined by necessity. Even a parent told, “Your car is on fire and your child is inside,” does not have one sure path of action. Rush to the vehicle? Scream for help? Call 911? There are always options to ponder. In any decision, beyond the mere facts of the case, there are other influences at play. You can be one of these influences.
Whether your purpose be noble or nasty, there are plenty of people ready to take your advice and be influenced by your thoughts. Beyond family and friends, you have audiences among your teachers, colleagues, members of community groups, customers of your businesses, prospective clients and, perhaps at some point, judges and juries.
In the contemporary workplace, the influence of one over many is more and more exercised in writing. The average professional is now called upon to write daily, contributing to letters and memoranda, reports, presentations, web copy, newsletters and even video scripts, all the while spending as much as two hours a day communicating through email. The opportunity to reveal one’s intelligence in writing is ever at hand, yet people who fancy themselves influential in person are often surprised—sometimes horrified—to find themselves unable to set down their thoughts persuasively on the page. In writing, they are rendered impotent.
Part of the challenge is that writing is a peculiar technology. While we may be able to choose which updated version of which word processor to write with, we are all forced to adhere to writing systems chosen hundreds of years ago by our forbears. There are many. The Chinese use a logographic system (as did the ancient Egyptians and Mayans) in which each character represents a concept, thing or sound. The Japanese work with a system in which each character depicts a whole syllable. Arabs use an alphabet that records consonants only. Cultures of Southeast Asia and aboriginal Canada use characters that represent vowels and consonants together.
Our Western alphabetic system combines characters each representing the sound of a single consonant or vowel, never both. Each basic unit of our writing—the letter—is a snippet of a sound. By combining letters, we form longer sounds that are really just recordings on paper of the sound of the words we use to represent our thoughts when we speak. We then gather words into phrases, phrases into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and, finally, paragraphs into documents.
Those who ask, “Why can’t I just write like I speak?” have noted that our western system of writing uses the sound of speech as its building material. Yet speaking and writing are remarkably different. While both technologies share one purpose (to pass thought from one mind to another), each offers the user a unique set of variables to achieve that purpose. These are controls that the user can adjust, learning through experience what effect on meaning any adjustment can have. When we speak, we add meaning with volume, having discovered early in life the remarkable difference between being whispered to and screamed at. We vary speed, speaking slowly to signal calm and quickly to express excitement. We adjust tone to reveal our mood as cheery or doleful, caring or snide. We shift frequency, speaking in lower registers to sound important, finishing sentences with higher notes to pose questions. We change pronunciation, mimicking the accents of people from other cultures and regions (frequently at their expense). We rely on gestures, shrugging shoulders, scratching heads, heaving sighs and stifling yawns to add useful layers of meaning. Each of these controls allows us to refine our messages beyond the diction, grammar, punctuation, syntax, logic and rhetoric that make up the whirring machinery of our language.
Yet while volume, speed, tone, frequency, pronunciation and gesture are six powerful variables of speech, not one of these controls was designed into the technology of writing. Those dials and knobs are simply missing, which is why we can’t just write like we speak.
When people lose one or more of their senses—sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste—they often compensate by developing their remaining senses to much higher degrees. They must do so to cope, and so it is with writing. When people must communicate at a distance without variables such as volume and tone, they learn to master the machinery of language—diction, grammar, punctuation, syntax, logic and rhetoric—to a much higher degree. Anyone who writes must truly master these six variables, for they are to the writer what touch and smell are to the blind and the deaf—the remaining senses critical for communication.
But is the secret to great writing then really just diction, grammar, punctuation, syntax, logic and rhetoric? They seem so heavy, technical and boring. “Maybe I’m not a great writer,” you may think, “but if I can get my point across, does it really matter if my grammar is perfect?” I’m convinced that if you can get your point across, the fine points of grammar don’t really matter at all. But can you really get your point across in writing? If so, how are you doing that?
The answer to that last question has been intriguing academics for millennia. Not many people are inherently persuasive; even fewer are consistently so. But those who are persuasive when they need to be know exactly what they’re doing. They always know what to say, and they always have a solid idea of how to say it. They’ve studied and perfected their craft and, in short, they know how to influence people.
The morale? You cannot be influential without becoming an adept writer. So get at it.
