Have you ever argued passionately with a friend and neither of you changes the other's mind even one little bit?   That difficulty in getting someone to change how they think is the central problem in marketing communications. Whether a company is trying to get you to buy a new brand of shampoo or a nonprofit is vying for your donation dollars, marketing communications is at work trying to persuade you of why you should do what they want.

I picked up (and read) "Writing to Persuade" by Trish Hall to see if I could learn how to make my work more effective. Hall's persuasion bona fides are that she was an editor of the New York Times op-ed page. Given that the op-ed page regularly attracts controversyAnd the book is an excuse for Hall to write about her journey to becoming a journalist and eventually an op-ed editor. In other words, there's more about Hall's life here than is relevant to learning how to be a persuasive writer. In fact, this book w

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