Teaching Persuasive Writing with Frankenstories

Understanding the persuasive context

For contentious issues, constructing a well-reasoned argument is often not enough to persuade an audience, because “reason” does not take into account the complex social & psychological dynamics of human beings.

Effective persuasion (and persuasive writing) begins with analysing this social context:

  • Speaker: Who’s trying to exert their influence?
  • Issue: What are they concerned about?
  • Audience: Who are they trying to change?

And we can also consider a couple of other important, additional questions:

  • Moment: Why now?
  • Goal: To what end?

We can use the results of this analysis to understand or develop a persuasive strategy.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of persuasion as unilateral, authoritarian, and adversarial: I am going to persuade you to agree with me.

This is especially true in school, where students write individual persuasive pieces for imagined audiences, and in Frankenstories we lean into this mode because one-way persuasion is practical and adversarial situations are fun.

However, it’s important to emphasise that persuasion is not always unilateral.

In real life, persuasion can and often should be collaborative and reciprocal; a shared exchange of influence.

In Writelike & Frankenstories we focus on writing, but persuasion is multimodal.

Remember that we persuade with image, sound, smell, motion, touch, body language, and many more devices beyond language.

When playing Frankenstories, it can help to write about characters persuading each other within a narrative so that players can describe persuasive devices & modalities beyond language.

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