[teachingenglishmadeeasy]

Quote susan53

Example sentence - You can convince someone that people can fly, but you cannot persuade them to try and fly.

In that example, the word "convince" cannot be changed out for "persuade".

I would say that it can. Do a corpus search in a concordancer rather than relying on your own intuition - both are used in both ways. If you look in a good dictionary (I checked the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary) you should find both definitions for both words.

Hi Susan,

I can see what you are saying, however, the two words should not be used interchangibly as they do have different meanings. To further my point, try thinking of the two words this way:

Convince = much stronger and pushy
Persuade = more suave

Ex. A pushy salesman will convince you to buy something while a suave salesmen will persuade you.

There is a difference.