reddit offers a unique window into how persuasion of self-declared open-minded people occurs online. However, while Tan et al. find potential proxies for personality traits, they cannot examine traits directly because they do not have personality profiles as we do here. They also do not examine the effect of argument style as we do.

Recent work [@habernal2016argument; @habernalmakes16] also examines what makes an informal social media argument convincing. They have created a new dataset of pairs of arguments annotated for which argument is more convincing, along with the reasons given by annotators for its convincingness. They test several models for predicting convincingness comparing an SVM with engineered linguistic features to a BLSTM, with both models performing similarly. In contrast to our experiments, they do not explore factors of the audience or explicitly vary the style of the argument.

Previous work also tests the hypothesis that dialogic exchanges might be more engaging, in the context of expository or car sales dialog [@Andreetal00; @Lee10; @Craigetal06; @StoyanchevPiwek10]. Work comparing monologic vs. dialogic modes of providing information suggest that dialogs: (1) are more memorable and engaging, (2) stimulate the audience to formulate their own questions, and (3) allow audiences to be more successful at 