Writing a persuasive essay is a complex task. Because the goal of a persuasive essay is to present one side of a tightly organized argument with supporting arguments and evidence, there are a number of skills you will need to write a good one.
Sometimes called an opinion essay, the persuasive essay is widely used as a measure of the student’s academic potential. Many teachers view a university education as largely about learning to find information and present it in an organized fashion in support of a testable claim about the world. Persuasive essay writing is therefore seen as a step toward mastering all academic writing.
Narrative writing, on the other hand, is not considered nearly as important.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few tools to make learning essay writing easier and more efficient? Here are five I have created for my colleagues. I hope you find them useful, guys.
1. Argument and rebuttal glossaries
To write an essay well, it helps to have the vocabulary to express your argument. You can build your vocabulary for essay writing with this glossary of argument vocabulary.
The glossary has terms, definitions, translations, pronunciation models, and sample sentences to help you learn how to use these argument terms.
You can test yourself with a fun argument vocabulary card game with two or three friends. If you have no friends, try this online argument vocabulary matching exercise.
If you want to include a counterargument and rebuttal, you might also like to look at the rebuttal glossary, rebuttal card game, and rebuttal vocabulary matching exercise.
2. Opinion essay outliner
Some teachers emphasize planning an essay before writing it. The plan for an essay is called an outline. To learn to write an essay outline fast, try the Virtual Writing Tutor’s opinion essay outliner. You will need a free membership for that as the system needs to be able to store your outline somewhere.
3. Body paragraph checker
As an intermediary step on the way to a full opinion essay, it would be helpful to get some feedback on your supporting arguments, right?
To that end, I created a body-paragraph formative evaluation. Write the meat of your hamburger essay first and work on the top and bottom bun afterwards.
4. How to write thesis statements
When the time comes for you to write a summary of your argument in the form of a thesis statement, you might want to try using a few helpful phrases. Here is a list of 30 ways to phrase a thesis statement.
For a more general and thorough explanation of thesis statement writing, check my blog post on how to write awesome thesis statements.
5. Formative opinion essay evaluation
Before you hand in your essay for a score from your professor, why not let me give you a score and feedback so you can make some improvements first? I created an opinion essay evaluation system. It checks essays in two seconds and gives you feedback and a score to help you improve.
Want to teach English abroad? Here’s a teacher training course you might like.
