Writing to Persuade in Six Steps

Writing to persuade has a lot in common with writing exposition. Your organizational and developmental strategies will be the same.  However, with persuasive writing, you write to convince, not to teach. There is a difference. Keep reading for five steps and how to structure your persuasive paper or article.

Writing to Persuade, The How

With persuasive writing, you make a claim, or statement you want others to believe. Then you must support these claims or statements with facts.  You should not use absolute statements and modifiers such as all, every, and always to support your claims. Most often, these absolutes are impossible to logically defend and will actually weaken your argument.

Writing to Persuade Example, What Not To Do

You couldn’t say “all children prefer chocolate cake to white cake” because even though some children most certainly prefer chocolate, all don’t and your reader may very well know just such a child. And there you will have lost them.

You also need to back up your claims with evidence: numbers, witness accounts, etc. Few intelligent readers will accept claims solely on your opinion.

Hopefully, if you are writing a persuasive paper on a topic, you already know a great deal about that topic. To be effective with your persuasive writing, knowledge of the subject is a required. This means, if you aren’t already an expert on the topic, you will need to do some reading and research. Don’t try to fa

ke your way through. Also, don’t forget to quote those resources and give credit where possible. Showing you have done the research from reliable sources will only strengthen your argument.

Writing to Persuade, Five Steps and How to Structure Your Paper or Article:

1. Make your claim in the introduction.
2. Second, recognize and refute your opposition (in the first paragraph preferably).
3. Once done with this, don’t mention the opposition again.
4. Voice your arguments (most of the space of the article should be dedicated to this), starting with your least convincing point and ending with your most convincing.
5. End strong (most convincing argument) for the most impact on your readers.
6. Now that you have them, restate your claim.

Now, go persuade someone.