ESSAY #4

 PERSUASIVE RESEARCH ESSAY

 

A commonplace essay of the editorial page is the persuasive essay. We use persuasion in every part of our lives from deciding with friends which movie to see to pushing your ideas in the workplace to debating the serious issues of our time, like the issues you chose for the informative essay. This type of essay is usually used in the TASP test which all of you will be taking.

 

Topic
For this essay you will use the same topic you used for essay three. Because of this, you will be able to use parts of essay three in essay four.

 

Content and Organization
You will write an essay that argues one side of the controversy connected with the topic of essay three, the informative essay.

INTRODUCTION

Like essay three, you will start with lead – in sentences. These introduce the reader to the topic. For this essay, you can use part of essay three. I suggest you take the important parts of the History and Current Situation of essay three for the lead – in sentences.

The thesis statement comes next. It is a declarative sentence that tells the reader the topic and you opinion about the topic. Avoid using "I," "me," or "my" in the thesis statement. Chapter 13 of your textbook provides solid guidelines for the writing of thesis statements for this essay.

Last, an essay map tells the reader what the essay covers. In this essay the essay map will consist of one sentence for each reason for your opinion. These sentences will come from the appropriate paragraph of essay three.

The Introduction will be at least one paragraph. You can use two paragraphs for the introduction. You might use one paragraph for the lead-in sentences, the other for the thesis statement and the essay map. If you do two paragraphs, make sure each is developed. If they are both short, then combine them into one paragraph.

BODY

The body of the essay will have a paragraph for each reason supporting your opinion. To do this part of the essay, you will take the reasons from one of the paragraphs of essay #3. Remember, that as part of that essay, you wrote two paragraphs, one each for the different sides of the controversy connected with your topic. Which side do you agree with? By doing more research, expand the paragraph by finding more information about each reason.

CONCLUSION

Summarize the essay by repeating the main points, for instance, the thesis statement and the reasons. You can finish the paragraph with a personal observation. However, don’t introduce a new aspect of the topic or a new topic.

 

Research

This assignment requires that you do some research. You will need at least two sources. I suggest that both sources contribute to the reasons for your opinion. Please refer to the materials concerning on-line research for open campus students. You can find this on the Library's web page; a link for it is on the External Links page of the course. You must do all the steps of this essay. They include a Library Assignment and Evaluation form for an article from a periodical from a peridical database. Use your E-Mail Learning Journal for questions and comments as you go through the essay assignment.