student persuasive essay samples

student persuasive essay samples

Analyzing and Understanding Persuasive Essay Samples: A Scholarly Approach

1. Introduction to Persuasive Essays and Their Significance

The goal to reach, from researchers in educational assessment, Educational Technology, as well as problem-based learning studies, is to assist teachers. Teachers who are already able to do a full task of persuasive writing may benefit from real-time hints on argument development in co-authored persuasive essays which are still being drafted by their students. Giving such a tool is then likely to produce an improvement in the students’ final essays. The original idea then is to insert into the medium supporting such drafts groups, in real time with the aim of guiding the students in strengthening their argument, dividing it, and reshaping it. The proposal does not plan for an integrated or global approach to the writing process in a PBL learning environment, but it is expected to be a useful complement to a full and suitable learning process approach.

Computational methods for evaluating an argumentation in persuasive essays are still in their fledgling state, mostly due to the lack of verified data. The current proposal responds to it by analyzing a sample of secondary school essays which belong to the genre of persuasive essays. In this, two steps were undertaken before the development: analyze the textual characteristics of the genre of the essays and find the obvious argument indicators. Subsequently, three expert independent raters were trained to recognize the lists of indicators of favorite and non-favored arguments in persuasive essays. As a result, a first small size corpus was built, and the raters trained by the data achieved an increase in their inter-rater agreement. At the same time, the current proposal is targeted towards teachers of secondary school students because of the descriptive approach to the classic tools used in discourse analysis of persuasive essays.

2. Key Elements of a Persuasive Essay

Before you start on the process of writing a straightforward persuasive essay, in order to construct an effective argument, you should keep the following in mind. It’s important to be mindful of the purpose of the assignment. If nothing else, understand that no matter what type of writing or what subject matter assignment is given to you, it has a purpose. The purpose of a persuasive essay is to prove a point. As you begin, try to keep one thing in mind: that you are supposed to construct a formal, logical argument, complete with two or three solid reasons, examples, and other evidence. At the end, a good essay is necessary with a conclusion page, containing a summary of what has been offered in your essay, with the main points and ideas presented.

The purpose of this is to present both sides (if more) or offer validation of only one point of view. Throughout the body of your essay, you will need to support all parts of your analysis and make a formal argument for why another person should agree with your position. Notice that the purpose of a persuasive essay is implied through the section headings list and the topics of analysis. A persuasive essay is supposed to make a point. The first question you may have is, “What is persuasive writing?” What is the point? The purpose of persuasive writing is, quite simply, to enter into a belief. You are telling someone how you view the world, why and how they should also look at the world in this way, as well as what they should do about it.

3. Analyzing Persuasive Essay Samples: Techniques and Strategies

How can students be encouraged to write stronger persuasive essays? Writing often and on various persuasive topics, such as homework, school uniforms, and uniformed officers should help them improve their composition skills. As Toulmin (1958) has said, students who are able to make good, well-supported claims can persuade readers. Most students must be taught how to do so. Although the quality, clarity, and persuasiveness of students’ essays should be apparent to readers once students have finished composing, teachers who can revise and clarify students’ thesis statements before students begin to write should focus on these essentials. This chapter suggests various techniques and strategies that teachers and students might consider using together.

According to Hochman (2014), 63% of students who took the essay pretest were unable to compose adequate conventional expository essays. 73% of students who took the essay posttest provided weak responses. A different assessment could question whether writers could produce a successful persuasive text. Slightly more than two-thirds of posttest writers couldn’t. The challenge for educators is to establish writing environments in which students’ writing instruments and writing minds will help them get their persuasive points across.

4. Understanding the Structure and Organization of Persuasive Essays

Structurally, a persuasive essay is a well-written argument. A persuasive essay contains an introduction, body, and conclusion. Connect your thesis statement to the activities in the larger introduction or that will follow in the body of the essay. Use the conclusion to validate the argument that was established by the introduction and body of the essay – claims. A claim is a statement that promotes your point of view. This should be a strong detailed argument. You must make your readers aware of this claim by including enough detailed examples to support that claim. You also must provide some level of interest to further the reader along in the process. To further your point in the persuasive essay, you must leverage the pieces of evidence to sound professional, leverage the structure of the essay to sound knowledgeable and point. Connect your ideas so that the reader can easily follow your point.

– Use engaging detail to support the argument or thesis. – The introduction, body, and conclusion of your essay will tell the reader what they need to know about your argumentative point. – Connect your ideas so that the reader can easily follow your point.

Persuasive essays contain several basic components that will ensure your point is argumentative. To write a sound persuasive essay, do the following:

5. Conclusion: Applying Insights from Persuasive Essay Samples

Straightforward efforts to offload teachers, who are already facing reverse incentives to focus on anything other than persuasive essays, by calling in legions of grading assistants or through more efficient machine scoring would, of course, carry large-scale implications based upon the results from the multimodal persuasive essay samples. The design and nature of the persuasive works that are collected for analysis will then be critical and window into the world of actual teenagers will help guide this effort with its findings.

The analysis presented here across 35 persuasive essay-sample pairs is informative in its own right but can suggest other questions and hypotheses for exploration. Effective means of increasing the relevance of these tests and of designing instructional strategies around the persuasive essay will then contribute to the high school experiences of millions of students, not all of whom would be candidates for any given test.

In this chapter, the structure, tone, and content of persuasive essay prompts similar to the ones being adopted for state high school graduation exams in several states are providing a basis for such scholarly investigation. As a logical extension to such research, the efficacy of the persuasive essays being produced could be tested through surveys, interviews, or focus groups with their authors or actual teenagers. Other researchers can collect and discover the content of the persuasive works and ask appropriate questions or conduct quantitative studies on relevant phenomena.

Scholarship typically aims to move beyond a mere description of past events and provide analysis, context, and insight into key issues. Wisdom and insight are honed over time and collaborative deliberation as researchers from a wide variety of settings pool together observations and findings, identify the likely limitations and shortcomings of these insights, and argue together (sometimes in an adversarial framework of publication and review) to winnow out the wheat from the chaff.