Motivational Writing: Increasing the likelihood that your views will be considered

Sharing personal opinion is by no means a new endeavor. Since Eve suggested to Adam that the fruit of the tree of knowledge was sweeter and more desirable than all others in the garden, we humans have been trying to persuade each others to consider our opinions if not follow our lead. This has never been easier to do than today with text messaging, blogs, YouTube videos, not to mention old favorites like letters to the editor, radio talk shows, and "coffee at the corner diner." But preparing a formal written argument or position paper, however, is something a bit more demanding.

Included below are links to 3 web sites that attempt to do just this. The first 2 are focused more on business and preparing White Papers related to products or services one wishes to provide. Although the examples used are not particularly useful given your objective, the methods outlines for accomplishing the goal are. The last link is to a rather good outline—and from a web site I refer to regularly with regards to anything related to writing, The Owl at Purdue university.

My formula has always been to prepare such a (see http://www.robertchapman.net/essays/parent.htm for an example ) paper from a perspective similar to on used when working with resistant, unmotivated, or disinterested clients in counseling. Counselors can never tell such clients what they need to know as this will invariably result in their dismissing you as either insufficiently knowledgeable to proffer anything worth considering or they will see you as a zealot with a personal agenda. In either case you lose the audience almost as soon as you start from such a position. Like the old adage suggests, “You can lead a horse to water, but cannot make it drink.” An interesting counter perspective is, however, “but you can salt the oats.” When you do this the horse becomes thirsty and its thirst motivates it to do what you had intended from the start. In short, the trick is to prepare a document that “makes the horse thirsty” so it decides to do what you had originally intended. In your case, to see the role that addressing collegiate drinking can play in resolving a financial dilemma that is a more prominent blip on senior administration’s radar screen. So you spend less time talking about the public health reasons for addressing collegiate drinking and more time addressing the quality of life consequences of it that cause students to transfer or not come to the school in the first place because of the reputation that results from the misperception of the social norms.

Reread Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull; pay particular to Fletcher Gull at the end of the story, after Jonathan transcends to the next level of spiritual being. Fletcher tries to tell all the young, ignorant, egocentric gulls what they need to know to transcend their current 2-dimensional, limited, restricted lives as he takes over Jonathan’s role as teacher. The “know-it-all,” spiritually blind, adolescent gulls start to rebel and dismiss Fletcher as some old fart who has nothing to teach because he is not with the times and therefore burned out. Fletcher then remembers Jonathan’s most important lesson about the path to spiritual enlightenment…start with level flight, or as AA suggest, Keep it simple.

My grandfather used to say, “Sometimes you have to give folks what they want in order to get the chance to given them what they need…he was among the wisest people I have ever met, and he never got beyond the 8th grade.

The key points to remember when preparing something like a White Paper is not unlike what an effective counselor considers when interacting with a client who may be at an earlier stage of readiness to change—collaborate with the client (your audience) and persuasively invite him/her/it to look at the facts from a different perspective in order to come to new conclusions regarding them. If successful, these new conclusions will require a new or different course of action. Think of Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man and how he sold River City on its need for a boys band. I do not propose manipulation and deceit as as hill's style as a flimflam man, but I do suggest presenting the facts as they exist in such a way as to suggest the point your paper tries to make regarding a possible solution to an existing problem is viewed in a positive light.

A mentor once suggested to me, never approach a anyone regarding a problem by just sounding an alarm or asking what will be done; approach with a solution to the problem and an argument for why your solution should receive serious consideration.

Here are the links:

1. http://www.stelzner.com/copy-HowTo-whitepapers.php
2. http://www.mwknowles.com/free_articles/white_paper/white_paper.html
3. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/546/1/

What do you think?
Robert