Is "persuasive techniques" or "persuasion techniques" more grammatically correct?

I've tried looking this up on various sources. Wikipedia has a category called Persuasion Techniques. However a couple of different Google searches for "persuasive techniques" and "persuasion techniques" suggests that the latter term appears marginally less often on indexed web pages.

Comparing "persuasive techniques" and "persuasion techniques" on Google Trends suggests that the former is used as a search term around five times as much.

Is one of these more grammatically correct or do they have different connotations?

For context, I will be using this term to refer to rhetorical devices, disinformation and other techniques that are used to persuade or deceive people.

Solution 1:

Both terms are equally correct grammatically. Persuasion techniques is an attributive noun (persuasion) modifying a noun (techniques). Persuasive techniques is an adjective (persuasive) modifying a noun (techniques).

But is it idiomatic to modify techniques with an attributive noun, rather than an adjective? Sure. Take a word that has no easily available adjectival inflection, say, dance.

Dance technique is considerably more common than either persuasion technique or persuasive technique (ngram).

Perhaps that's not a good comparison, because we have no choice in the case of dance. Then let's make a quick hop to ballet and see that ballet technique is far more common than balletic technique (ngram).

However, this pattern is not consistent. A further leap, but still in the realm of graceful movement, surgery technique barely registers when compared with surgical technique (ngram).

Interestingly, this example introduces a new and relevant wrinkle. Surgical can mean either "relating to or used in surgery" or "denoting something done with great precision." This means that some of the examples of surgical technique found in that ngram probably don't describe techniques used for surgery. They could describe techniques for doing something entirely different, but which are performed with surgical precision.

This may also be the case with persuasive techniques, which might describe a technique that is itself convincing. Theoretically, this makes the phrase persuasive techniques ambiguous - we might not be sure whether it describes a technique for persuading, or a technique that persuades. A phrase that's ambiguous is not wrong, but it often makes sense to avoid ambiguity where possible. That said, I'm a little skeptical that realistic contexts exist where the meaning of persuasive techniques wouldn't be obvious. And if the phrase is only theoretically ambiguous, not actually ambiguous, there's probably no good reason to avoid it.