high school persuasive essay samples

high school persuasive essay samples

Analyzing the Effectiveness of Persuasive Essay Samples in High School Education

1. Introduction to Persuasive Writing in High School

At best, high school students worry that they may forget to add punctuation, synonyms, citations, visual literacy, or a sufficient rebuttal. At worst, the development of a thesis statement based on an opinion, followed by reasons achieved through biased resources, shapes a persuasive essay which is not persuasive at all. Prior to implementation of the study, students were not aware that I believed in the use of persuasive essay samples to help them learn, provide them with good writing role models, or offer opportunities for feedback and mastery. My hope was that by means of a seven-point Likert scale questionnaire along with observation field notes and follow-up interviews, the study could provide answers to the research question: What is the perceived effectiveness and usefulness of persuasive essay samples and its explicit instruction in persuasive essay writing through a sample-based study in a high school setting?

While the teaching of writing is recognized as important by English teachers, the assignment of a persuasive essay requires students to use a range of academic writing and critical thinking skills. During my experience as both an English teacher and a writing fellow at a local high school, the development of a structure for creating a persuasive essay became an important part of daily lesson plans, meetings with teachers, and after-school writing center sessions. I strove to assist students as they composed persuasive essays that maintained a thesis statement, good reasons which support it, at least three points which accounted for both rhetorical and logical reasoning, and a solid introduction and conclusion. To be sure, it was difficult for many students to synthesize all components of academic writing fluently, coherently, and in a relatively brief manner.

2. Benefits of Using Persuasive Essay Samples

However, their influence might be in wide-ranging education levels. Senior students may have identified advantages relevant to their unique benefit but, based on senior students’ perceptions, advantages can be decided for lower grades also. Another group of students, such as college students, could have an improved understanding and other potential advantages. Considering this open issue, it is important to plan specific education levels for the utilization of essays for maximum efficiency. Teachers may be able to select essays that appeal impressionable or counterproductive to persuasive functions with the three blended benefits. Enthusiasm for writing; high-quality command and enthusiasm; the first benefit category focuses mainly on the writing skills of the authors. Common advantages depend on composition, vocabulary, ordinary topics, grammar usage, and interpretative strategies or qualities.

Teachers and students can both benefit from the distribution and utilization of essays. There are evident benefits in arguing solutions and supporting them as defined by the senior students in the advanced placement class who responded. These students in the sample have identified three categories of benefits: (1) writing benefits, (2) positive stimuli, and (3) brilliant models. They imply that essays might aid various types of composition writing, making classrooms more efficient at improving students’ writing skills and achieving better outcomes. The high school students, who have found writing to be difficult, propose solutions to the challenge.

3. Analyzing Different Persuasive Essay Samples

Official publisher documents of the state standards tests for English Language Arts were the sources for the persuasive essay sample documents used in this project. Teacher-referenced scoring of the original essays was the initial step, giving the essays a reference set of original essay scores. After the newest writing assessment was completed, the majority of the scoring of 70 more rewrites of these essays in the set was deferred while sample selection and evaluation continued. By delaying all essay scoring for these essays until after sample selection and analysis had begun, the co-authors were able to be those in charge of designing and driving this research and always be the scorers. With rewrites scored after the regular state assessment scoring, it was possible to compare these rewrites to the original essays and see how much of a difference within each essay it makes if the original essay is revised.

In this research project, we asked the question of whether these sample persuasive essays found online and offered to students can really show students what essays at each score level look like, so that students would realistically know how they should try to score. We are especially interested in knowing if the lowest score sample essays are helpful to students, since those would be the papers showing students what kind of writing should be avoided.

4. Strategies for Incorporating Samples into High School Curriculum

Finally, some of the teachers took samples that were less keenly targeted at their students’ persuasive essay assignment and instead looked for parallels for related standards. For some of our participants, the discussion of these samples acted as a bridge and connection to foundational writing principles, such as editing or sentence construction.

Students also expressed recognition of integrating a college essay into their existing knowledge of persuasion and seeing variations on a similar theme from model essays. In addition to these natural convergences between persuasive writing samples from different genres, other teachers used samples from literature to improve writing in their persuasive essays. These teachers used the literature samples to reinforce and elaborate on pertinent standards, often with a literacy theme or plot that often reified the lesson objective.

Many teachers touched on the evolution of schools as ecosystems for marketing. When discussing the importance of understanding target audiences, several teachers mentioned the proliferation of advertising aimed at attracting students to their schools. Teachers included a portion of examples in their instruction to illustrate certain criteria for college admission, scholarship packages, financial aid options, relevant majors and programs, etc.

Another teacher created a jeopardy-like game using real examples from 50 successful Harvard application essays. By playing the game, students were exposed to a well-rounded selection of persuasive arguments across the genesis continuum, and students identified those samples as some of the most helpful to their own writing development.

First, one teacher created the display of persuasive samples we mentioned earlier. Her samples were taken from a variety of different sources: textbooks, nonfiction books, and previously published student work. In addition to attaching labels, she asked students to highlight different components of persuasion. Later, the students used those attributes to draft more cohesive essays.

Many high school teachers are currently working on existing curriculums, and they may not have the time or resources to develop and implement entirely new strategies to improve the teaching of writing. Based on the feedback gathered from teachers participating in this study, we offer a number of other suggestions that can be easily incorporated into existing classrooms.

5. Conclusion and Recommendations for Future Research

Although research seeking to understand these ideas is limited, it does provide a few recommendations for teachers and for school administrators. First, a persuasive genre continuum may be an effective tool for teachers to use when attempting to differentiate teaching styles for each genre. Second, using controversial debate issues tied to students’ backgrounds to present real-life examples, and modeling writing and using a multitude of persuasive essay samples may effectively teach students how to write a persuasive essay effectively primarily using persuasion based on reason. Third, having students perform activities that help them distinguish among differing forms of persuasion may be beneficial. Further research on the persuasive essay should examine several things.

The most important benefit derived from the IBMYP program is that it motivates higher-order thinking and teaches students to become independent learners and creative thinkers. However, the lack of research in general and recent literature on the persuasive essay hinders teachers’ capacity to effectively teach students how to analyze, research, and move beyond persuasion based on personal opinion. The importance of focusing on the persuasive essay in school programs is not only to help students form and express their own opinions but also to help them be exposed to different points of view and understand the different audiences and situations involved. This understanding would ensure students do not inadvertently offend their audience, a student acting as a juror not understanding that only factual information may be used in the jury room, or a student’s response in history class that is too bellicose, and students flaming each other in blogs and response spaces.