This evening’s fine distinction is “convince” versus “persuade.”
You convince someone to believe something.
You persuade someone to do something.
So, you convince someone of the existence of God, and then you persuade them to go to church.
The book goes on to point out that while the distinction is purely grammatical—the distinction being that convince is to be then paired with “of” and then a noun, while persuade is to be paired with “to” and a verb—practically speaking, convince comes to pertain to matters of thought, while persuade pertains to matters of action. Keeping them to those distinct applications can help make our speech or writing very crisp and proper…but they’re also so often used interchangeably that it’s becoming less and less of a hard, strictly observed rule.
Love it!
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I had a very, very productive day. We had a water leak expert come out today to try and find where our water main—the pipe that runs from our meter out by the street to our house where the shutoff valve is—is leaking. And it is leaking, unfortunately. The little triangle is always moving these days, and our last water bill was way way too high. He didn’t find it definitively. But, he’s pretty sure he got close. At the very least, he got some moisture readings in one area. The pipe is PVC, which is great in that it won’t rust, but bad in that they make very little noise when they leak. Plumbers, two of them, are out tomorrow to give us a work estimate.
Writing was good. I made big progress. Feeling a little zonked because of that, and that I’m doing a lot of ad schooling. Both of those tasks kinda make my head spin, anxiety threatening overwhelm and whatnot. Which is all not real. It’s just defense mechanisms coming up. Something I can try to ignore as much as possible and just push through, which I am. I’m not going too fast. It’s a good pace. I just need to keep it up until it feels normal. Not easy to do, but I can do it. Both writing and ad stuff. I will actually be able to get off my outline to Craig this Friday, which is a relief. It won’t alllll the way be done, but close enough to start writing the following week, and THEN it will be done done. And 30 pages into the story. Can’t wait for that. I can share it with the email list, proof of progress. It’s actually, finally, happening. What a colossal effort it has been. Finally here.
Got my Shakespeare reading started with King John. Instantly…what an odd play. It’s reading almost like a comedy, especially the Bastard’s soliloquy about suddenly being fancy with royal blood. We’ll see where it goes, but already it feels like a play he didn’t ever go back and revise or rewrite much, meaning later on in his career when his skills had reached their zenith. We’ll see, though.
Night night.