How To Write A Persuasive Essay: A Comprehensive Guide

WHAT IS A PERSUASIVE ESSAY?

The core feature of a persuasive essay is that you are attempting to persuade your audience that your position is right, and that they should do something or buy something in consequence. In writing a persuasive essay, you must keep in mind that your core goal is to persuade your audience to develop a specific opinion or take a specific step to make a change in their lives. This action orientation is unique to writing a persuasive essay and is not typically present in other types of academic essays.

Writing a persuasive essay correctly means that one must be aware of the target audience that they are writing for. If you are writing a persuasive essay on why everyone should get a dog, you would not use the same language and arguments that you would for a class of six graders for a group of boardroom executives. Your teacher or professor is likely to specify a target audience that you are writing for and the level of writing and presumed existing knowledge present in your paper should reflect the target audience your are writing a persuasive essay for.

In writing a persuasive essay, you will most often use logic, regarding the advantages of your position, so as to encourage your reader to accept it. At times, you will supplement this logic with the use of sources, running the gamut from studies to statistics, which serve to confirm that arguments that you are making in writing a persuasive essay. Providing strong evidence to support your arguments is critical to excellence in writing a persuasive essay. Make sure that you choose yours sources and how you present them in a manner that is appropriate for the target audience assigned to you for writing your persuasive essay.

Ultimately, writing a persuasive essay is about convincing your reader to adopt your position. In writing a persuasive essay, the audience that you are attempting to convince is your professor, regardless of which target audience that they might have asked you to write for. With this in mind, writing a persuasive essay and getting a good grade necessarily means providing a set of arguments that are powerful and which are also tied together neatly. While you should separate your different arguments across different paragraphs using topic sentences and/or headings, writing a persuasive essay also means that these different forms of support for you position should flow with each other. This means that you should use seamless transitions between paragraphs to ensure that your persuasive essay’s arguments are as cohesive as possible.

HOW TO WRITE A PERSUASIVE ESSAY

The first step in writing a persuasive essay is to choose the topic that you wish to write on, and then choose a position in relation to this topic. Typically, writing a persuasive paper involves either being for or against a given topic or involves attempting to convince the reader to buy or not buy a certain good or service. While writing a persuasive essay often involves you choosing your own topic and position, it will sometimes involve you having to choose a position from a list of topics supplied by your professor. In either of these cases, it is best to choose a topic that you know about and argue for a position that you care about as this will significantly lower the amount of research that you will need to know to write a persuasive essay successfully.

Once you have chosen and elaborated your topic and your position, you should write the body paragraphs of your persuasive essay. Each body paragraph should focus on one different element regarding the case that you are making for or against your topic. Because writing a persuasive essay is very much about showing that you can write in an organized fashion, make sure that you write your persuasive essay in a manner where your different lines of argumentation are separated across paragraphs. When you write a persuasive essay, you should use topic sentences or headings to differentiate between the different arguments in favor of your position that you are making in distinct paragraphs. Finally, you will want to conclude writing your persuasive paper with a conclusion that goes back over your arguments but that does not introduce new arguments.

Finally, and to provide an example of how a persuasive essay might be written, one could write an argument in favor of the idea that everyone should adopt a dog from a shelter rather than buy one. The thesis of such a persuasive essay would be that all of us should adopt dogs from shelters instead of buying them from breeders because dog breeding is cruel and unsustainable. The first body paragraph would support this argument by arguing that too many dogs are killed in shelters each year to justify the continued breeding of dogs. The second body paragraph would support the argument by using emotion, or pathos, to suggest that adopting a dog is equivalent to saving a life. The third body paragraph could support the position by demonstrating negative consequences of dog breeding like puppy mills and hereditary medical conditions. The conclusion would bring all of these elements together and emphasize why adopting a dog is better than buying one. While this may be a very simple example of how to write a persuasive essay, it provides the basic outline upon which any persuasive essay is written.

HOW TO FORMAT A PERSUASIVE ESSAY

When writing a persuasive essay, you are most likely to be asked to use MLA style for formatting and referencing. This is because most persuasive essays are assigned in English classes. If your teacher or professor does not provide you with an MLA template, the style guides made available online for free by Purdue can be very useful. Make sure to stick to your style guide and cite all of your sources so that you do not lose points on your persuasive essay, and so that you are not accused of plagiarism.

Once you have formatted and referenced your persuasive essay in line with the guidelines provided by your professor and/or the style guide, review your persuasive essay’s body paragraphs to ensure that each paragraph contains a single line of argumentation in terms of supporting the topic of your persuasive paper. From there, make sure that you are not repeating yourself across body paragraphs and that you can clearly distinguish between the arguments all the while tying them together in support of your position on the topic you are writing your persuasive essay about.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PERSUASIVE ESSAY AND A TRADITIONAL ESSAY?

The main difference between writing a persuasive essay and writing a traditional academic essay is tied to the manner by which a persuasive essay is tied to a narrow topic and is encouraging the reader to take on your position. While all essays are written in a manner that attempts to convince the reader to accept the thesis, writing a persuasive essay is slightly different as it involves supporting your thesis, embodied by your position on your chosen topic, in a manner that will convince the reader to adopt your point of view or take action in relation to it. This action orientation is what mainly separates a persuasive essay from any other type of academic essay and is something that you must remember to adhere to as you write a persuasive essay.