"In the course of doing research for a book on how people actually change their minds, and what gets them to say “yes” rather than "’no,’” I was distressed to find that I knew much less about it than I thought I did.

"I figured that my nearly five years as the New York Times Op-Ed editor gave me a pretty strong vantage point on what worked and what didn’t. It did — but I didn’t always know why.

"What I sensed intuitively about effective writing turned out to rest on some deep psychological truths. Understanding them provides tactics that can be exploited in both personal and written interactions."

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.nytimes.com