Persuasive Essays

Easy Persuasive Essay Writing

Persuasive essays require students to provide evidence in an attempt to influence readers to change their thinking — a skill that even the best student writers find difficult.

Before writing a persuasive essay, students learn to be reflective by generating ideas to support each side of an issue before deciding what their position is. As they develop their initial plans, students decide how to refute opposing viewpoints in the text of their paper.

In addition, students need to develop sophisticated essays that go beyond the most basic format of premise, supporting reasons, and conclusion.

The six stages to planning a persuasive essay are:

1. Discuss it. Talk about the issues with others. This opens up new arguments which you will have to counter in your writing

2. Develop it. Research background knowledge. Study your subject and ensure you are fully aware of all critique that may be levied at your point of view

3. Model it. This means planning and composing the essay by writing down your main arguments, writing down the main points of critisism, and noting how you will deal with these

4. Support it. It’s all very well having a strong opinion but you need to support it with academic authority

5. Write it. Use the structure below to help you.

6. Review it. Give it to someone else. Ask them to critisise it. Remember, you’re trying to persuade others of your point of view. If it isn’t convincing, you want to here why.

You should understand that good writers plan before composing and that planning leads to better persuasive essays.

A persuasive essay will take a structure that looks something like this:

INTRODUCTION to your persuasive essay (Around 10% of your word count)

• Set the scene. Start with an attention grabber or something to catch the reader’s imagination and get them interested
• State the issue
• State your opinion
• State the main arguments against your opinion
• Let the reader know you’ll be presenting material to support your opinion and deal with the arguments against it

BODY of your persuasive essay (Around 70-80% of your word count)

Each idea, concept or belief takes this form:

• This is my opinion/idea about this issue
• Here’s some evidence to support my opinion (make sure it’s quality evidence and your opinion is well supported)
• Here are the main arguments against the idea
• Here’s how I can deal with those arguments.

You can set out as many issues or arguments as you like but you should try and focus on the main arguments, and set them out in terms of importance – the most controversial issues come first.

CONCLUSION to your persuasive essay (Around 10-20% of your word count)

This is where you review what you’ve done and basically, state that you’re right, summarising how you’ve proved this. You don’t put any new material in this section. Instead you will say something like:

• We’ve looked at this issue
• Recap – this was my belief/opinion
• We’ve presented evidence to support the opinion
• As we’ve seen, these critisisms were thrown against my opinion
• We’ve showed how those were wrong
• So-and-so agree that the critisisms were wrong too.

If you’ve followed this guide, you should have a great persuasive essay. But remember, the best way to check it’s convincing is to show it to others. If they can see arguments against your work, then you should consider revising what you have written to meet these arguments.