  The ability to persuade others is critical to professional and personal
success. However, crafting persuasive messages is demanding and poses various
challenges. We conducted nine exploratory case studies to identify adaptations
that professional and non-professional writers make in written scenarios to
increase their subjective persuasiveness. Furthermore, we identified challenges
that those writers faced and identified strategies to resolve them with
persuasive natural language generation, i.e., artificial intelligence. Our
findings show that humans can achieve high degrees of persuasiveness (more so
for professional-level writers), and artificial intelligence can complement
them to achieve increased celerity and alignment in the process.
