Ever dreamed of being a journalist but unsure where to start in an age where anyone can publish, algorithms shape visibility, and AI can generate copy in seconds? The question now isn't just how to break in, but what journalism is, and what makes writing feel vital and true.
In a new series, Roe McDermott explores the human elements AI can't replicate: voice, craft, instinct, and the slow process of discovering what you think - qualities that still make writing matter.
In this instalment, Roe examines the art of argument - journalism as persuasion.
There's a word journalists like to use when they want to sound clean: neutral. Neutral reporting. Neutral tone. Neutral language. Neutral voice. Neutral as in: I am not trying to convince you of anything, I am simply placing the facts in front of you like a beautiful charcuterie boards of meats, cheeses and grapes and you may choose, freely and rationally, what to do with them.
This is one of the oldest myths in journalism, and also one of the most convenient.
Because to write is to persuade.
Not always in the obvious sense – not always in the op-ed voice that declares its position, not always in the activist mode that explicitly argues for change. But persuasion is happening even when the writer is "just" describing. Even when the piece is shaped like a report, or an explainer, or a straight news story, or a review that pretends it’s "balanced." The moment you choose what to include and what to leave out, you are making an argument about what matters; the moment you decide where to begin, who to quote, what detail to linger on, what to frame as a controversy or a tragedy or a policy failure or a moral panic, you’re not simply transmitting reality – you are shaping it.
And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.
The problem is not that journalism persuades. The problem is when it persuades while pretending it doesn’t. When the rhetoric is invisible, it becomes more powerful, because the reader doesn’t realise they’re being guided and so has no say in where they end up being led, or the route that took them there.
So instead of clinging to neutrality as a kind of purity myth, I think writers are better served by getting honest about the fact that journalism is rhetoric – and then getting good at rhetoric, in a way that’s ethical, legible, and deliberate.
and Bob Woodward uncovered the Watergate scandal
Because persuasion isn't just about manipulation; persuasion is how meaning is made. It’s how we connect evidence to consequence, experience to context, detail to pattern. It’s how we persuade someone to care – which, in a world that constantly trains us to be numb, might be one of the most radical journalistic acts left.
The tools of persuasion (and how they show up in different genres)
Persuasion isn’t one thing. It’s a kit of parts. And most journalistic genres rely on different combinations of those parts, sometimes without naming them.
1) Framing: the argument you make before you make an argument
Framing is the most basic form of persuasion because it’s where you decide the container for the story. Is this piece about a "clash" or a "crackdown"? A "scandal" or a "system"? A "culture war" or a "labour dispute"? A "tragedy" or a "policy choice"? Frames aren’t just semantics, they create a moral architecture. They tell the reader where to place sympathy, blame, curiosity, disgust, outrage. This is why two outlets can cover the same event and produce radically different realities without changing a single fact. The rhetoric is in the scaffolding.
And in a supposedly neutral news piece, framing often does the most work precisely because everything else is written in that calm, professional voice that signals: trust me, I’m not biased. The frame becomes the argument you don’t have to defend.
2) Evidence: what counts as proof, and what kind of proof the reader will accept
Journalists love evidence because it feels sturdy. Numbers! Studies! Documents! But even evidence is rhetorical, because we’re always making choices about what kind of proof is persuasive to this reader, in this context.
A policy explainer will lean hard on statistics and institutional reports because its persuasion strategy is: I am rational, you are rational, look at the data. An investigative feature might persuade through documents and pattern recognition: here are five examples, here is a paper trail, here is a system. A review persuades through interpretive authority: I have taste, I have context, trust my judgement. A personal essay persuades through experiential proof: this happened to me, and through me you can understand something bigger.
None of these are "more objective" than the others, they are simply different rhetorical contracts – but every contract has a weakness. Statistics can flatten lived experience, anecdote can generalise too fast, documents can become a fetish for "receipts" that ignores the messy truth of how power operates. The point is not to purify yourself of rhetoric - the point is to know what you’re doing, and what it does.
3) Emotion: the thing we pretend is separate from reason
We talk about emotion in journalism like it’s the enemy of truth, as if facts exist in one box and feelings in another, and the only ethical journalist is the one who never lets the boxes touch. But emotion is not a contaminant. Emotion is information. It tells us what we value, what we fear, how we’re impacted by events. Emotion tells us where the stakes are.
A piece that persuades purely through emotion can become propaganda, yes. But sometimes a piece that refuses emotion altogether often becomes something else: a kind of moral cowardice. A refusal to name harm as harm. A refusal to let the reader feel what the facts actually mean.
Craft is choice, and choice is responsibility.
This is where "neutral tone" can do real damage. If you describe something horrific in the same language you’d use to describe a traffic update, if you demand that impacted communities report on their pain without emotion, if you silence the expressions of harm, you’re making an argument too: you’re arguing that victims aren’t too be trusted, the reader should not be moved, that nothing is urgent, that this is just the way things are.
Sometimes that’s a stylistic choice. Sometimes it’s a worldview. Either way, it persuades.
(More on emotion in journalism next week.)
4) Anecdote and scene: persuasion through specificity
Anecdote is powerful because it bypasses abstraction. It’s one person, one moment, one voice. It makes the stakes legible. It’s also risky, because one person is not a representative sample, and scene can become a sleight of hand: the vivid detail that convinces you something is common just because it’s memorable.
But this is why features are so persuasive. They don’t just tell you a thing is true; they make you experience the truth of it, at least for a paragraph.
And scene isn’t only for long-form writing. Even a short news story can persuade through a single image: a mother holding a plastic bag of belongings; a protester’s shoes worn thin; the sterile language of an official statement placed beside the human cost it tries to erase. Those choices are rhetoric. They are also, often, the difference between information and understanding.
5) Language and rhythm: persuasion at the sentence level
Sometimes persuasion is structural. Sometimes it’s microscopic: the adjective you choose, the verb you attach to a subject, who gets agency in the sentence. "Police shot a man" versus "a man was shot." "The company enacted harm" versus "mistakes were made." Passive voice is not just grammar; it’s politics, as is euphemism, irony, understatement, and the strategic use of certainty.
Rhythm matters too. Short sentences create urgency and force. Long sentences can create nuance, momentum, inevitability, connection. Repetition can build moral pressure. A rhetorical question can pull the reader into complicity. Even a semi-colon can persuade: look, I am thoughtful; I contain multitudes; trust me. (In my case it can also mean I spent too much time in academic; I need help.)
Every stylistic choice is an argument about how you want the reader to move through the piece, and what you want them to feel when they get to the end.
Why persuasion matters in the age of AI
And all of this matters more now, in the age of AI, because AI writing is often persuasion without conviction – rhetoric without stakes. It can produce the gestures of balance, the posture of neutrality, the smooth cadence of reasonableness, without any genuine accountability to the consequences of what it’s framing and legitimising. Which means human writers have a new responsibility: not to purge rhetoric, but to make it visible, conscious, and ethically grounded.
Because if you don’t know what kind of argument you’re making, something else will make it for you: your outlet’s house style, your editor’s assumptions, the social media discourse you’re anticipating, the easiest narrative available, the default template an algorithm would choose.
Craft is choice, and choice is responsibility.
Exercise: Make the Rhetoric Visible
1: Pick a "neutral" piece
Choose a straight news report (500–800 words). Not an op-ed. Not a review. Something that claims to be just the facts.
2: Identify the persuasion tools
As you read, annotate the piece by marking:
Frame: What is the story about? What is treated as the core problem?
Agency: Who is doing things? Who is having things done to them?
Evidence hierarchy: What counts as proof here – statistics, officials, eyewitnesses, "experts," common sense?
Emotion cues: Where does the piece invite empathy or distance? Where does it use euphemism?
Absences: What feels missing? Whose voice isn’t here? What context is assumed rather than stated?
Write 5–8 bullet points, just noticing.
3: Rewrite the lede three ways
Take the first paragraph and rewrite it in three different rhetorical modes:
The data-first lede (more evidence, less scene)
The human-first lede (more specificity, more lived experience)
The system-first lede (more context, more structural framing)
Keep the facts the same. Only shift the rhetoric.
Step 4: Name the argument
For each version, write one sentence beginning:
"This version persuades the reader that…"
If you can name the persuasion, you can control it. If you can control it, you can make it honest.
Next: The Emotional Register: When Feeling Sharpens Fact
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