Persuasiveness and Assertiveness in Professional Writing

Any writing that you do is aimed at either amplifying what people already believe in or changing what they know. Through your write-ups, you are trying to update your boss regarding the progress of your project and in many instances might even be trying to change their knowledge and opinion of the project currently. Changing people’s opinion is always a difficult task. You might be wondering how do you go about doing that?

Let’s watch the next video as Rakesh walks us through the process of developing more persuasive and assertive writing styles:

As we saw, people’s opinions can be changed in the following three ways:

• Creating trust in them
• Making logical arguments
• Forming an emotional connect with them

You need to keep these points in mind while drafting documents in a professional setting.

Some of the questions that you need to be prepared to answer while trying to persuade someone  and the ways in which you can answer them are as follows:

• Who are you?
  • Talk about a common acquaintance or use the designation and name of your company to your advantage.
• What do you want from me?
  • Talk about your objective.
• Why should I agree with you?
  • Talk about the advantages of them working with you.
• What's in it for me?
  • Give them additional benefits.

These were tips that you can use to be persuasive. But how can you be assertive?

The five points that you need to keep in mind in order to be assertive are as follows: 

• Come straight to the point
• Follow the written content
• Stick to your terms and conditions
• Never negotiate over an email
• Write an email after the negotiations are completed to bind them

With this, you have reached the end of this session on fine-tuning your professional writing.

In this module, we covered some fundamentals of good writing- basic principles to follow, common frameworks to structure and scaffold your draft, polishing it and taking feedback before publishing it. Next, we covered some good practices to write professional emails, reports and proposals, what not to include in these documents and lastly, how to be persuasive and assertive in our writing.