Strategies for Teaching Persuasive Writing
Scaffold
Essays can be extremely intimidating to adults, let alone young children. As a way to make essay writing a little less daunting, introduce persuasive essays a different way. Show students how they are surrounded with persuasion every day. Give your students real life examples of when they have already used persuasion to convince their parents of something.
Other Modes:
Other Modes:
- graphic organizers
- poem
- bumper sticker
- advertisement
- business letter
- travel guides
Organize Your Argument
Persuasive Essays are generally organized with an introduction, body, and conclusion. The graphic organizer to the right can be helpful for students to begin their thought process. They can fill out this graphic organizer in order to be sure they are not leaving out any of the important features of a persuasive essay.
Above is a youtube video of a chant that can be used in the classroom to help students remember how they should organize their persuasive essay.
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Develop the Argument
All arguments should be based on fact. Use a mentor text to show how each reason or argument should be supported by fact. Dear Mr. Blueberry by Simon James shows how Mr. Blueberry tried to convince Emily that there couldn't possibly be a blue whale living in her pond because of facts about blue whales. The T-Chart in the document to the right can help to show this.
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Another way to use a T-Chart to help students develop the argument is to ask students to come up with strong arguments that do not sound like begging or whining. Use the mentor texts Earring!, The Good-Bye Book, and Alexander, Who's not (Do You Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going to Move by Juith Viorst.
Dorfman & Cappelli. 2009. Nonfiction mentor texts: Teaching
informational writing through children's literature, K-8. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers. |
Know the Audience
A writer should always think about his or her audience before writing. This is especially important in persuasive essays, as the writer is trying to persuade the audience of something. Use RAFT (Role, Audience, Form, and Topic) assignments to create authentic assignments with a target audience (other than the teacher). RAFT Lessons can often be used as cross-curricular lessons so are excellent for Social Studies!
http://www.readwritethink.org/professional-development/strategy-guides/using-raft-writing-strategy-30625.html
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Know the Counterargument
Often times, the best way to persuade someone of something is to look at it from the opposite perspective! An excellent Mentor Text to exhibit the counterargument is I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff. In this book, Alex tries to convince his mother to let him have a pet iguana. With each letter that Alex writes to his mom, she writes a letter offering a counterargument to his reasons. Each time, Alex needs to rethink his arguments and think about things fro his mother's perspective. A Pro/Con Chart is a great way to get students thinking about both the argument and the counterargument. The best essays will argue the counterargument, before the reader gets a chance to!
Dorfman & Cappelli. 2009. Nonfiction mentor texts: Teaching
informational writing through children's literature, K-8. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.
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Reflect
Be sure to give students the opportunity to collect feedback from their audience through the use of checklists or written comments. This can allow students to revise or set goals for future writing pieces and to gain confidence in their own writing abilities.
Dorfman & Cappelli. 2009. Nonfiction mentor texts: Teaching
informational writing through children's literature, K-8. Portland, Maine: Stenhouse Publishers.
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Graphic Organizers for Persuasive Essays