Key to persuasion are considerations of audience. To argue convincingly, you must go beyond writing for yourself, or "writer-based" texts, to writing with specific audiences in mind, or "audience/reader-based" texts.

To do this, ask yourself the following questions about your audience:

who are they?
how much do they know/care about this issue?
what is their current attitude?
what are their likely objections to my claim?
what shared values and assumptions do they have (with me, the writer, and each other)?

Ethos, or credibility, is also a key element of persuasion. Audiences will want you to present yourself as knowledgeable and fair. Use whatever you can to establish this credibility in your writing, and a large part of this is achieved through tone.

Pathos, or feeling, plays on audience emotion and helps develop sympathy for your views. To create pathos, use concrete language, illustrations, specific examples and narratives, words, metaphors, analogies, and connotations.

Arguments may be:

One sided: good for using with a supportive audience
Multi-sided: good for using with a resistant audience
Classical: good for using with an undecided audience

Strategies for rebuttal include the following:

deny the truth of your opponent's data
cite counter-examples or testimony
doubt the representativeness or sufficiency of examples
doubt relevance or currency
doubt the credibility of experts
doubt the accuracy or context of quotes
doubt the statistics' production or interpretation

With a very resistant audience, you may need to use a Rogerian argument, which delays announcing your claim directly until the end of your essay. This way, you have a chance to build sympathy and cite evidence for your position before you reveal what it is. With such audiences, it is also wise to stick to a win/win formula, showing what everyone has to gain by taking the position you are advocating.

Finally, if you possess the gift of humor, by all means use it! Hyperbole, understatement, satire, and parody are all wonderful ways to connect with audiences. Make people laugh, and they may be predisposed to like you and to keep listening or reading. Be careful with this, though, as poor or inappropriate attempts at humor will backfire.

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