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Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

The article provides four categories of essays: argument, explanation, definition, description.

Personally, I've found it useful to think of almost everything I write as a variation on "argument". Perhaps I'm also describing, defining or explaining something, but there's always a core substrate of persuading. A integral part of defining something well, for example, is to simultaneously argue for why the defined idea is interesting and useful; without that, it's all too easy to descend into abstract nonsense.

My approach isn't universally applicable—it leads to a particular writing style—but it certainly helped me in organizing my writing and organizing my thoughts. Whenever I write I'm always making a point even if I wouldn't classically think of it as a "persuasive" essay.

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I see a fundamental conflict for writing between persuasion and logical argumentation.

Persuasive writing means I want to reader to get into an agreement habit. Start with something uncontroversial and work towards your core point. Avoid detours. Avoid negative triggers. In contrast, for a logical argument you should include objections and address them.

Persuasion works on a more psychological level and logic is not that relevant. As long as you don't trigger too many bullshit detectors in your audience, you are fine without logic.

I think there's clearly a dimension of persuasion that falls outside strictly logical argumentation. That said, if you're writing something, it had better be something you want others to believe.

There needn't be a fundamental difference, in my view. You can structure and describe true premises and relations persuasively without manipulating your reader.

According to Aristotle, persuasion has three parts - logos, pathos and ethos. Your logical argumentation is logos, a powerful tool but not the only way to persuade. Pathos is the appeal to feeling (avoid triggers), and ethos is the establishment of trust, authority, credentials, character. Different persuasive tactics work with different audiences. On HN, logos can work. In US elections, pathos tends to work.

I suspect that any of the four styles is actually broad to be used for any piece of writing someone might do. So everything can be an argument (or an explanation etc).

Still, if you see everything you write as argument, perhaps you consider branching out a bit. Everything has a persuasive aspect but letting that persuasive aspect be implicit/toned-down come sometimes makes it stronger - a simple description of a war zone can be a stronger argument against war than a series of logical claims, or oppositely, an explanation of how to use a particular power tool may include an argument that person should use that tool safely but it's not something that needs to be pushed too hard.

The key idea is to give your articles/essays some structure before publishing them. That structure will generally be a nested form of constructs like arguments/ definitions/ explanations.

I think following two basic things helps:

   - Give your article a structure. 
   - Make it easy for reader to navigate that structure.

It works best when that structure is simple. If it gets much complex, divide it into multiple articles and publish as series/book. If it gets complicated, give it some more thought till it fits into some structure.

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