Learn English – What’s the distinction between “nonessential” and “inessential”

1. Suasive is an adjective that, in Linguistics (Grammar), "denotes a class of English verbs, for example, insist, whose meaning includes the notion of persuading and that take a subordinate clause whose verb may either be in the subjunctive or take a modal."

2. Persuasive is an adjective as well, that means being "good at persuading someone to do or believe something through reasoning or the use of temptation: an informative and persuasive speech." OR "She was very persuasive!"

The difference, then, is that while the former denotes a grammatical class for verbs, the second is adopted the way you already know, with people, situations, etc.

EDIT NOTE: In the OED it says that a speech can be "suasive" but considering the OALD and my dictionary didn't have it, I supposed it was an old use or it fell into disuse. So I checked the Ngram on google and it confirmed what Billare said and what I was thinking.

Yes. Continuous means from some start to some end without break:

The water flowed continuously over the dam.

whereas continual means occurring repeatedly at intervals over a time span:

I continually lose at poker.

I should also mention that continual is often substituted for continuous, and would be correct in most contexts, however the converse is not generally true. That is to say,

The water flowed continually over the dam.

is okay, but you would (hopefully) not mean

I continuously lose at poker.

since that would imply that all you do all day long is play poker and lose.