To help my college writing students understand the attitude needed for creating a strong argumentative essay, I invented the "5 C's" device, which emphasizes clarity, candor, confidence, control, and comprehension. Clarity. Be direct and straightforward in your argumentative writing. Directness results in clarity. Use your own language, plainly and accurately. Never use words of which you don't know the exact meaning. Avoid tortured or overstuffed sentences always. Don't waste time getting straight to the point. Don't keep your audience in suspense; suspense is for mystery novels, not for argumentative essays. Candor. Make it your mission to be honest with your readers. Give readers something they can actually use in the real world: hard-won advice, useful facts that you've discovered, a careful description of problems, and actionable solutions to those problems. Level with your readers about important information that less courageous writers would rather not write about. Confidence. Be both calm and firm about the rightness of your argument. Don't demand that readers agree with you; ironically, such an approach shows lack of confidence. Invite readers to agree with you and congratulate them for choosing your firm side.
Acknowledge opposing points of view, but refute them immediately and resolutely. Read classic writers who argue with calm confidence, whether or not you agree with them, such as Machiavelli in The Prince, and steal their attitudes. Don't get distracted or go off track. Deploy the power of understatement. A strong argument has more impact when discussed matter-of-factly than when screamed or shouted. Don't quote others excessively. Always retain the first word and last word of every paragraph for yourself. Balance the structure of your essay. Each section of the essay should have a specific role. When it fulfills that role, move on. Avoid overly long paragraphs generally; especially avoid overly long first and last paragraphs. To prevent an overloaded beginning that merely confuses readers, avoid explaining yourself in the first paragraph. Dare your readers to be interested in the rest of your essay beyond the beginning. Let your first paragraph establish your topic and your thesis only, and move swiftly to the middle paragraphs where all your explaining should happen. Comprehension. Whatever your topic, proactively show readers that you understand it well. Be both a helpful guide through complex issues and an informed judge when choices must be made. Cover your territory fully and give readers information that they're not likely to know. Generous sharing of useful, real-world knowledge is the fastest way to establish trust with your audience. Never forget the ultimate goal, which is to contribute your wisdom freely and help your readers sincerely.
But how do you argue vehemently about an issue that is clearly one sided? While you might be able to marshall a good argument and write a compelling essay, the problem is that one sided topics simply won't pique a student's interest. Thus they're not effective topics. For example, a topic about whether or not the Holocaust was a genocide probably isn't very compelling. There's pretty much one acceptable answer to that question. Instead, you might ask students to write a persuasive essay about whether Hitler or Stalin was a "worse" dictator. Although this requires some level of background knowledge, reasonable people could make an argument for either choice. This is especially important because one aspect of an effective persuasive essay is that students can anticipate and shut down counter arguments. That would be difficult to do if every rational person argued the same things as your students. Finally, you want to make sure that your kids actually have something to do.
While How To Write The Argumentative Essay is based on opinion, many persuasive writing topics do call for some level of background knowledge. Take, for example, these ten persuasive writing prompts about political issues. They are all highly contentious issues in the news, and people across the country argue about them every day. An informed citizen would have no problem writing an essay in support of one side or the other. But if a student knows nothing about the federal budget, revenues, and expenditures, how can you expect them to make an effective argument about the best approach to dealing with the federal deficit? This is one good reason to base writing tasks around topics with which students have personal experience. However, it's also a good reason to provide students with a background information through an assigned reading, a video clip, or a lecture. You could also develop a webquest, like these persuasive writing webquests, to guide students through completing research before they craft their argument.
Just remember that good arguments are based on both facts and opinions. So don't ask your students to write about persuasive writing topics on which they have absolutely no knowledge. Choose Your Topic. Work on Organization. Once you've selected a set of persuasive essay topics and writing prompts from which you students can choose, it's time to work on the actual writing and organization. How to actually write a persuasive essay and how to teach the process is outside the scope of this hub. However, you may want to try using the interactive essay map described here. It's a nice tool that I've used with my students in the past to help them outline arguments for expository essays, and it should work just as well for an argumentative essay. Just remember to choose a topic about which students care, choose a topic with multiple rational answers, and ensure that your students have some background knowledge. Do that, and you should be good to go. This post was generated with Essay Freelance Writers!
To help my college writing students understand the attitude needed for creating a strong argumentative essay, I invented the "5 C's" device, which emphasizes clarity, candor, confidence, control, and comprehension. Clarity. Be direct and straightforward in your argumentative writing. Directness results in clarity. Use your own language, plainly and accurately. Never use words of which you don't know the exact meaning. Avoid tortured or overstuffed sentences always. Don't waste time getting straight to the point. Don't keep your audience in suspense; suspense is for mystery novels, not for argumentative essays. Candor. Make it your mission to be honest with your readers. Give readers something they can actually use in the real world: hard-won advice, useful facts that you've discovered, a careful description of problems, and actionable solutions to those problems. Level with your readers about important information that less courageous writers would rather not write about. Confidence. Be both calm and firm about the rightness of your argument. Don't demand that readers agree with you; ironically, such an approach shows lack of confidence. Invite readers to agree with you and congratulate them for choosing your firm side.
Acknowledge opposing points of view, but refute them immediately and resolutely. Read classic writers who argue with calm confidence, whether or not you agree with them, such as Machiavelli in The Prince, and steal their attitudes. Don't get distracted or go off track. Deploy the power of understatement. A strong argument has more impact when discussed matter-of-factly than when screamed or shouted. Don't quote others excessively. Always retain the first word and last word of every paragraph for yourself. Balance the structure of your essay. Each section of the essay should have a specific role. When it fulfills that role, move on. Avoid overly long paragraphs generally; especially avoid overly long first and last paragraphs. To prevent an overloaded beginning that merely confuses readers, avoid explaining yourself in the first paragraph. Dare your readers to be interested in the rest of your essay beyond the beginning. Let your first paragraph establish your topic and your thesis only, and move swiftly to the middle paragraphs where all your explaining should happen. Comprehension. Whatever your topic, proactively show readers that you understand it well. Be both a helpful guide through complex issues and an informed judge when choices must be made. Cover your territory fully and give readers information that they're not likely to know. Generous sharing of useful, real-world knowledge is the fastest way to establish trust with your audience. Never forget the ultimate goal, which is to contribute your wisdom freely and help your readers sincerely.