There are 3 types of persuasive writing, named after the appeal they make: logos appeals to the reader's reason, pathos to their emotions, and ethos to the writer's character and credibility. The strongest texts often use all three.
Different minds have different opinions. That does not mean you cannot win people over to your view. One way to get people to believe what you say and follow your suggestions is persuasive writing.
The three appeals go back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who described them in his work on rhetoric. Which one you choose depends on what you want to appeal to in your reader.
The 3 types of persuasive writing
Logos: appealing to reason
This type of persuasive writing appeals to people's logic. For that, you need strong arguments backed by facts from credible sources. Charts, graphs, and numbers help you present them.
Say your organization helps people turn their lives around, and you are applying for a grant to expand your work. In your proposal, state how many people your organization has helped over the past years. If most of them succeeded and only a few went back to their old way of life, show it with a bar chart or a pie chart.
Statistics are persuasive, and charts make the numbers easier to grasp. When your readers have to make choices and decisions based on facts and figures, use this type of persuasive writing.
Pathos: appealing to emotions
Not everyone makes decisions based on logic alone. Emotions play an important role too, and some people follow their feelings even when their logic says otherwise.
Say you are raising donations for workers who lost their jobs when the factory in their town closed. You can appeal to your readers' emotions by describing what those workers have gone through: they lost their jobs, some were evicted from their apartments, and they could not find new work to feed their families.
One thing to remember: never lie to get the effect you want. Everything you describe must be true, without a shred of exaggeration. When readers sense that a story has been inflated, it puts them off.
Ethos: appealing to character
For examples of persuasion through ethos, look at product endorsements. Companies know that talking about their product's features and benefits is not enough. That is why they ask well-known people to become their brand ambassadors. When many people know and trust the ambassador, some of that trust carries over to the brand.
Opinion pieces in newspapers are another example. If you have no background in climate science and write about what people should do to stop climate change, your arguments carry little weight.
It is a different story when you have years of experience in climate research, and even more so if you have worked in the field in several countries that are dealing with the effects of climate change. When you put your character and knowledge up front, your writing becomes much more persuasive, because readers know they can trust your words.
Combine the three
Those are the 3 types of persuasive writing. You do not have to stick to one of them: you can use all three in a single essay or article. A strong way to close is with pathos, an appeal to your readers' emotions, because a closing that moves the reader stays with them.
Persuasion is not the same as argument, though: persuasive and argumentative writing have different goals.
Finally, proofread your writing before you publish it. A marketing text that is meant to persuade loses its effect when it still has errors here and there. The Spell Checker marks the spelling, grammar, and punctuation mistakes for you to fix.