  Interpreting how persuasive language influences audiences has implications
across many domains like advertising, argumentation, and propaganda. Persuasion
relies on more than a message's content. Arranging the order of the message
itself (i.e., ordering specific rhetorical strategies) also plays an important
role. To examine how strategy orderings contribute to persuasiveness, we first
utilize a Variational Autoencoder model to disentangle content and rhetorical
strategies in textual requests from a large-scale loan request corpus. We then
visualize interplay between content and strategy through an attentional LSTM
that predicts the success of textual requests. We find that specific (orderings
of) strategies interact uniquely with a request's content to impact success
rate, and thus the persuasiveness of a request.
