The important difference to me is that there is no inherent relationship between a description of reality and what you should do with it. I feel like perhaps the difference between the way you and the mods are using these terms comes down to thinking of them primarily as adjectives or as verbs.
Trying to restate your perspective of writing, it seems you always ask whether something is a persuasive description of reality.
That makes sense to me, in an of itself. But if my restatement is correct, notice that the objective of the writing is to describe reality. To make the adjective/​verb contrast more clear, consider the difference between these two instances:
* persuasive explanation
* explanatory persuasion
In the first instance, I might be looking for things like: whether the thinking is clear; whether the explanation agrees with my other knowledge; whether it seems to apply to other test cases. In the second instance I would be looking much more at whether they had identified what I want correctly, what they are saying to do about it, and whether the explanations provided suggest that it makes sense. The purposes of writing are different; one is explaining, which is to say describing reality; the other is persuading, which is to say changing beliefs or behavior.
To fix the distinction in other familiar terms: the reader has a map of the territory. Explaining is about the relationship between the map and the territory. Persuading is about where the reader should go on the map.
The important difference to me is that there is no inherent relationship between a description of reality and what you should do with it. I feel like perhaps the difference between the way you and the mods are using these terms comes down to thinking of them primarily as adjectives or as verbs.
Trying to restate your perspective of writing, it seems you always ask whether something is a persuasive description of reality.
That makes sense to me, in an of itself. But if my restatement is correct, notice that the objective of the writing is to describe reality. To make the adjective/​verb contrast more clear, consider the difference between these two instances:
* persuasive explanation
* explanatory persuasion
In the first instance, I might be looking for things like: whether the thinking is clear; whether the explanation agrees with my other knowledge; whether it seems to apply to other test cases. In the second instance I would be looking much more at whether they had identified what I want correctly, what they are saying to do about it, and whether the explanations provided suggest that it makes sense. The purposes of writing are different; one is explaining, which is to say describing reality; the other is persuading, which is to say changing beliefs or behavior.
To fix the distinction in other familiar terms: the reader has a map of the territory. Explaining is about the relationship between the map and the territory. Persuading is about where the reader should go on the map.