Ultimately, writing an argumentative essay is a process in which you apply sources and critical thinking to take a position on an issue or argue in favor of an opinion regarding a phenomenon. Critical thinking about the issue, based on logic or secondary sources, is critical for providing a sound opinion on the topic or issue you are writing about. You cannot invent facts or make illogical arguments when you write an argumentative essay. Your professor will be grading your argumentative essay for coherence and this is one of the most important elements of being successful when you write an argumentative essay.
The first step in writing an argumentative essay is to choose the position that you will take on the issue that is assigned to you. If you have the opportunity to choose your own issue to write an argumentative essay on, you should choose something that you know and care about as this will make it much easier to write a cohesive argument in favor of a position on this issue. If you do not have this choice, write an argumentative essay on the prompt that you are most familiar with. From there, and before writing the thesis of your argumentative essay, do some research on the topic to find sources that will make it easy for you to take a position on one side of the issue or the other when you write your argumentative essay.
Once you have chosen and elaborated your position and thesis, it is time to build the body paragraphs of your argumentative essay. Each of your body paragraphs should use a different type of information so as to support the argument that you are making when you write an argumentative essay. Do not repeat the same reasons across the different paragraphs of your argumentative essay’s body. Instead, it is important that you write an argumentative essay by segmenting your different lines of reasoning in separate paragraphs by either using good topic sentences or headings.
Finally, and to provide an example of how an argumentative essay might look, let us return to the subject of anthropogenic climate change. The thesis of such an essay could be that anthropogenic climate change is real and a result of human activity. Writing the first body paragraph of the argumentative essay would then focus on the various ways that humans produce carbon emissions and how these exceed our planet’s carbon budget. The second body paragraph can then discuss how a clear and linear relationship exists between the onset of human industrial activity and the worsening of climate change. Finally, the third body paragraph can focus on how today’s dynamics of climate change are historically unprecedented and are thus necessarily a consequence of human action. In writing an argumentative essay on this topic, you could then conclude by elaborating why the other position is wrong.
