Writing a persuasive essay requires expressing your viewpoint and convincing readers of its rightfulness. Many struggle with completing this type of written assignment because of a lack of proper writing skills, the inability to express a point of view clearly, or follow the paper outline.
Many useful sources on the Internet can help students master their skills and get writing assistance. To create an effective persuasive essay that appeals to readers’ emotions, you must follow special writing tips. Read the article and find out persuasive techniques to compile an excellent essay.
Definition of a Persuasive Essay
A persuasive essay is a type of academic writing where an author uses logic and arguments to convince readers that their point of view is legitimate. Besides, a writer can appeal to feelings and emotions to persuade the audience to take their side.
The primary evidence is your personal opinion and thoughts. And then, you support your solid evidence with research, facts, examples, quotes, and statistics.
Persuasive essays are also called argumentative essays due to arguments and supporting facts. However, we should differentiate between these two types of essays. In persuasive essays, it’s required to represent opposite opinions and choose one side. Convince readers that you are right using supporting arguments.
On the contrary, when writing an argumentative essay, you should describe all arguments and counterarguments objectively, leaving the freedom of choice to the reader.
Three Components of a Persuasive Essay
A professional persuasive essay consists of three main elements: ethos, pathos, and logos. They were introduced by Aristotle and are known as modes of persuasion. These essential persuasion constituents will help you build an engaging and effective persuasive essay that influences readers’ opinions. Let’s take a closer look at these three persuasion elements:
- Ethos is used to persuade the reader of the author’s credibility and knowledge. This element of argument establishes the good moral character of the writer. It is a helpful tool for presenting your viewpoint since people are more likely to trust a knowledgeable and experienced author.
- Pathos is an act of appealing to an audience’s emotions and feelings to manipulate and persuade. You can connect with readers easily if you evoke specific emotions like anger, joy, or sympathy. It makes persuasive essay writing more compelling and memorable.
- Logos is an appeal to the audience’s logic. A writer tries to persuade readers of the rational validity of the arguments. And for this reason, they use supporting evidence like statistics, quotes, facts, and other logical data elements.
Guide on Writing the Persuasive Essay
Writing a good persuasive essay requires time and effort. Students may come across different guidelines for completing this assignment. Formulate a strong persuasive essay and fully convince your readers by following these simple steps:
Choose a Killer Topic
It would help if you persuaded people of something you believe. So choose a topic that is close to your views and can reflect your opinions the best way. It’d be great if you could find enough supporting materials on your essay subject.
Research Both Sides
Since every argument has a counterargument, you should explore all information about opposite sides. Knowing another view on the issue is crucial and being able to justify your perspective. Analyze many reliable sources to support your argument.
Know Your Audience
Learn the audience you will target with your persuasive writing. This insight can help the writer form proper arguments and tailor language. Try to find what may influence readers and what means are better to use to achieve that.
List Your Reasons
Even though you do not need to present hard evidence in your persuasive essay, it’s crucial to support your personal opinion with logical reasoning. Your writing will be more convincing if you present as many reasons as possible to support your ideas. Knowing the audience, you can make reasons relatable to them.
Plan a Thesis Statement
Drafting a thesis statement helps you make your stance clear to the audience. You can not generate a strong argument without a good thesis in your persuasive writing. Here it would help if you defined what you will persuade readers of and how you can do that.
Appeal to Emotions
If you want people to agree with what you present in the essay, try to evoke certain emotions. This act of appealing to readers’ emotions and feelings is called pathos. You can make the audience angry, relieved, happy, worried, excited, etc. The neutral tone of the persuasive essay is a lost cause.
Include a Strong Call to Action
When you write a persuasive essay, decide what you expect the audience will do after reading it once they take your side and what actions they can take. It depends on the essay topic and can range from signing petitions and donations to supporting your idea in further works.
The Prewriting Stage of a Persuasive Essay Creation
Prewriting is the first stage of the writing process. It helps to plan your essay, organize your resources and ensure you have everything for a good persuasive essay with a coherent argument. During the prewriting stage, you must define your approach, consider your audience, review your research, and create an outline. So let’s learn about these phases more.
- It’s crucial to develop a clear approach to writing a persuasive essay. Think carefully about the issue and decide which side to take. Your working statement can be summarized in one or two sentences. You will focus on it, developing arguments for the essay.
- Before writing the essay, you should know who might read your work. Identifying age, gender, ethnicity, and views on politics and religion is essential to tailor your writing tone. These aspects may highly influence how the audience perceives your viewpoint. If it’s impossible to answer who these readers will be direct, try not to make critical assumptions that can offend some groups.
- A writer should suggest convincing evidence backed by reliable sources for persuasive essay writing. You must find as many relevant sources as possible to select the most compelling ones for your essay. Do not rely on a single source to support your evidence.
- Then it would help if you created an essay outline to make your work well-structured. It will help you generate logical and coherent arguments. Consider that the persuasive essay should have a clear introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
Structure of the Persuasive Essay
A clear five-paragraph essay structure will help you effectively present arguments and write a persuasive essay. You create an essay outline for connecting your arguments logically during the prewriting stage.
When you know how to start and finish your work, persuasive essay writing will go smoothly. Remember to support your ideas with strong evidence and refer to counterarguments.
Introduction
The introduction in your persuasive essay writing should be strong and engaging. It should include a hook, background information, definitions of terms, and a clear thesis statement. Make a concluding sentence in your introductory paragraph for smooth transitions to the next paragraphs.
Body Paragraphs
You should write at least three body paragraphs to present reasons for your opinions. Consider supporting your ideas with strong evidence. Each body paragraph in persuasive essays includes a topic sentence, evidence, and analysis. It would be best if you connected paragraphs in a persuasive essay so that they make a big picture.
Opposing View Paragraph
Counterarguments play a huge role in persuasive essays allowing the reader to ensure that the author’s view is right. When you write a persuasive essay, identify the opposing position in your work and respond to it. It’d be great to oppose the counter argument paragraph with evidence and examples. Finally, finish this paragraph by proving that your argument is stronger.
Conclusion
The concluding paragraph in persuasive writing connects all arguments. Here a writer can establish the significance of their persuasive essay writing. Do not introduce anything new but include a call to action and give readers food for thought.
Tips on Essay Editing and Proofreading
Once students write persuasive essays, they need to revise and edit their work carefully. At this stage, you should check everything, starting from spelling, grammar, vocabulary, structure, coherence, logic, and arguments.
When editing your essay, find if the paper answers the assignment question. All resources should be appropriately cited and support each argument of your persuasive essay.
There are plenty of free tools for checking errors in persuasive essays. They are good for detecting typos and grammar mistakes. Free programs provide basic editing features. If you want professional editing assistance, you can pay to check your work on logic and coherence.
But there’s nothing better than a human proofreader who understands all nuances of the language well. You can ask your friends, professor, or an expert editor to check your essay.
What are Effective Persuasive Techniques
You know that ethos, pathos, and logos are three crucial elements of effective persuasive essays. But other techniques can help you convince readers of your arguments’ correctness.
- Choose words carefully, using strong language that can impress the audience. Emotive language, literary devices, wordplay, jokes, quotes, and sayings are great tools for connecting with the reader.
- A clear thesis statement is a key to persuading readers. It must be strong enough and compelling to represent your opinion. Please include it in the essay introduction so that the audience sees what you convince them of.
- Another crucial technique when you write persuasive essays is speaking directly to readers. Address them with “you” and build a tight connection throughout your essay. In such a way, your paper will be more like a conversation, especially when you include questions for moving from one paragraph to another.
Conclusion
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