NOVEMBER 10 — On November 2, I found myself sitting in a classroom at Universiti Malaya, attending another session of my MA in Publishing Studies. 

That evening, the subject was persuasive writing. I remember looking at the topic and thinking that I probably wouldn’t enjoy it very much.

I have always enjoyed writing, particularly the freedom to tell stories and make sense of ordinary experiences. Persuasive writing, however, sounded rather like work. 

There was something about the idea of constructing an argument to convince someone that made the whole exercise feel less appealing.

But my reluctance went a little deeper than that.

I have always been uncomfortable with the idea of imposing my beliefs or convictions upon others. We arrive at our understanding of the world through different experiences, and I have never felt particularly entitled to tell someone else how they should interpret theirs. 

To me, persuasion suggested an attempt to make another person agree with something they might otherwise have thought differently about. Perhaps unfairly, I associated it with manipulation.

Fortunately, I kept those thoughts to myself and paid attention to the lesson.

As our lecturer began explaining the anatomy of persuasive writing, the subject became unexpectedly familiar. There was the hook, designed to capture a reader’s attention, followed by the claim and the reasoning that supported it. 

I began recognising similarities with AIDA, the marketing principle built around attention, interest, desire and action.

Having encountered AIDA before, I could appreciate the logic behind arranging information in a particular sequence. What had initially sounded like an exercise in changing people’s minds began to look more like an exploration of how communication works. 

The techniques themselves were not necessarily manipulative. Much depended on how they were used, and perhaps more importantly, why.

That recognition made me think about my own writings. When I write, I rarely begin with a conclusion that I want readers to accept. 

More often, there is a memory or an ordinary incident that has stayed with me. I try to tell the story as faithfully as I can, allowing whatever meaning it carries to emerge along the way.

Yet I also make choices. I decide where a story begins, which details belong in it and how much to leave unsaid. Even when I have no intention of persuading anyone, those decisions influence how readers encounter the experience.

In an earlier essay, I wrote about my late mother pawning her gold bracelet for RM500 to help pay for my university registration. 

The story began with my arrival in Kuala Lumpur as a young student, long before I fully understood what that money had meant to her. I could have opened with a statement about parental sacrifice, but I preferred to let readers discover the circumstances through the story itself.

Some readers might recognise something of their own parents in that experience. Others might remember a different kind of kindness. They need not arrive at precisely the same conclusion I did for the story to mean something to them.

Perhaps that was the distinction I had been overlooking in class. Writing can influence how someone understands an experience without requiring that person to agree with the writer’s interpretation. 

Of course, storytelling can also be used dishonestly, just as an argument can be presented with sincerity. Neither form is automatically innocent or manipulative.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how often our associations with particular words shape our expectations elsewhere in life.

We hear that someone is ambitious and imagine a person who puts career advancement above everything else. We describe something as traditional and immediately associate it with either reassuring familiarity or an unwillingness to change. 

These impressions are not necessarily baseless. They usually come from things we have seen or experienced. But they can also prevent us from noticing other possibilities.

I had done something similar with persuasive writing. Before the lesson had properly begun, I had already decided what the subject represented, simply because of what one word meant to me.

By the end of the class, I found myself rather interested in a topic I had expected to dislike. My original conviction about respecting other people’s freedom to think differently remained intact. What had changed was my understanding of the techniques that writers might use when communicating with them.

Later that evening, I wrote a short reflection in my notebook about how certain words acquire particular meanings in our minds, and how strongly those meanings can influence our impressions of something we have yet to understand properly.

I ended the entry with “C’est la vie!”, which seemed an appropriate response to having spent an evening enjoying a lesson I had quietly decided, before it began, that I probably wouldn’t like.

* Nahrizul Adib Kadri is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering, the Director of UM Press, and the Principal of Tuanku Bahiyah Residential College (KK2), Universiti Malaya. He may be reached at nahrizuladib@um.edu.my

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.