Following the opinion pieces by Amy Hewes posted over the past two weeks, here is instruction on writing the argument and persuasion personal essay. It appeared in Writing It Real in 2014. I look forward to hearing from you in the comment section about your own experience writing in this form and about how this refresher course might help.

 

…reason works better when emotions are present…

–Rollo May, The Courage to Create

There are times in your life when you desire to persuade others to take action or change their thinking.  Letters to the editor and op-ed sections of newspapers and magazines contain writings from personal experience motivated in this way. Using personal experience in persuasive writing provides material you can use to persuade others.  It also helps you use feelings to encourage the reader to understand the importance of your argument.        

What does it take to write persuasively and to move others to read and stay interested in your argument and point of view and perhaps change their thinking and behavior?  There is a recipe to this kind of writing:  1) making an assertion; 2) providing at least three supports; 3) ordering that support toward a crescendo; 4) giving time to the opposing position; and 5) using images and details to persuade the reader instead of relying on emotionally loaded words that tell, rather than show.

To write effective argument-and-persuasion pieces, you must understand the feelings that make your opponents behave as they do, and you must express that understanding. Second, revealing your own feelings is the best way to make connection with your readers–although they may not think like you do, they do have the same repertoire of feelings, just as adults understand discomfort even if the situations that make them uncomfortable are different than the ones that make children uncomfortable.

Examining your experience in the argument and persuasion essay, you learn not only what your own point of view is, but also how you formed it.  If you begin by believing that everyone (including yourself) should think like you do and value what you value, you will short-circuit your own ability to find out what you really believe and what you truly value.  In working the steps and exercises I am about to describe, you will have the opportunity to learn about your own thinking and where it came from.  You will get to see if it still fits.

Sample Argument and Persuasion Essay

Adoption Not Always the Stuff of Fairy Tales
by Christi Killien Glover

It was the middle of a blazing Houston summer in 1970 when my parents decided to adopt a 3-year-old boy. They were both 37 years old and already had three children, two girls and a boy. I was the oldest, an adolescent with long blonde hair, skirts I rolled up short on the way to school and a pile of Glamour magazines in my room.

Dad told us we would meet our new brother on a get-to-know-you outing at the Houston zoo. Fine, I remember thinking, but will it take all afternoon? We stared as Tony scraped every crumb of his McDonald’s hamburger off the table into his mouth. Later, my parents explained how Tony had been abandoned by his alcohol- and drug-addicted birth mother, along with his three younger brothers, one of whom died of malnutrition.

This, in 1970, was no reason to assume that Tony had been affected. At least not by anything that a good family couldn’t heal in a jiffy. My parents could create a better present so that the past no longer mattered.

Mom told me recently that the minute Tony came into our house, she felt the tension. When Tony stole and lied, as most kids do, Dad wouldn’t leave him alone. Dad was enraged that Tony wouldn’t admit it or even cry. I was astonished that he wouldn’t cry. I was crying all the time, when I wasn’t arguing his defense. My brother David coped silently, but neither of us could seem to connect to Tony or and enjoy him, either.

My sister Leslie, who is much closer to Tony in age than David and I, clearly did connect. Leslie and Tony were comrades. She truly loved him. I say loved, because he is dead. Tony had just turned 19 and was in the Navy when on April 4, 1986, he hanged himself on his ship. For months afterward, I’d wake up in the night gasping for air, grieving for Tony, for myself, for my failure.

Working at the Northwest Adoption Exchange for six years, I learned that many of the families who adopt special-needs children (this means anyone but healthy infants) and do it well, especially in the black community, are associated with a church. It is an act of faith, no doubt about that. My dad was a very religious man. But for us, religion, like good intentions and even love, wasn’t a match for the challenges of raising a very hurt child.

Without the support of a community and specialists, our family crumbled under the weight of it. At work, I thought about Tony as I wrote little biographies of the kids that went into our royal blue binders and onto our Web page. If Tony were in the system today, I’d no doubt be obliged to include in his profile the usual litany of diagnoses: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, Fetal Alcohol Effect and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. There would be medications and therapy, or at least, awareness.

I thought about my parents when I learned that kids who have experienced extreme neglect and abuse often can’t attach normally. Adoptive parents of these children get frustrated and angry at the pervasive detachment; in fact, the adoptive mothers, who take the brunt of the child’s unconscious fear and anger, describe the sensation as being attacked.

In addition, kids with the kinds of neurological disorders that Tony must have had don’t learn cause and effect. Logic and natural consequences are so many vapors in the room. Tony wasn’t capable of blending in or of following the rules. His early brain formation and lack of nurture sabotaged his life. But that isn’t the only information I’ve needed to understand what happened.

What I also learned is that my mother and dad could never have parented him. They had no support, and they had misplaced reasons for adopting Tony in the first place. A sense of benevolence, of needing to share, is not enough. You have to understand the individual child’s terms, adjust expectations for attachment and achievement, reach out to every one and any one who can help and then pray. That way, when you realize that you’re in over your head, chances are much better that the story won’t end in tragedy for you or for your adopted child.

Necessary ingredients of the argument essay:

• The assertion:  Adopting hurt children puts a strain on families and on adopted children that can prove lethal and perhaps only one condition helps the situation:  participation in a supportive religious community.

• The three supports: Although the parents believed that three was no reason to assume Tony was deeply and permanently affected by his early environments and that adopted parents can create a better present so the past no longer matters, Christi’s mom admitted that she felt tension as soon as Tony came into the household.   Christi’s behavior as well as that of her siblings changed.  Tony ultimately committed suicide.  Researchers know that the consequences of early detrimental environments often include neurological and psychological disorders.

• The crescendo:  We witness the speaker’s first meeting with Tony, we learn about Tony’s difficulties with Christi’s dad and his suicide, and we learn about the speaker’s subsequent job experience in the adoption field.

• The opposition:  A paragraph is devoted to which community the speaker found out does well in this area.

• Images and details that speak directly:  The little boy Tony eating every crumb of his McDonald’s hamburger, his inability to cry when his adopted father yelled at him, the speaker waking up at night gasping for air, the list of diagnoses associated with hurt children, the sensation of adoptive mothers feeling attacked, the description of impaired children’s behaviors, and the label misplaced reasons for adopting.

Exercises and Tips for Gathering Your Material
Divide a sheet of paper into three columns.  Label one column “personal experience,” one “social experience.” and the last, “educational/vocational experience.”  Jot down any and all experiences that come to you under these headings.

Your columns might look like this one by a student:

Personal	Educational/Vocational	Social
Dating	Going to college	Being part of the local arts community
Being single	Trying grad school	Growing up middle class
Family Council	Learning dance	Being part of a neighborhood
Only daughter/adopted	Social work	Fundraising
Being in debt	Writing Courses	Event Planning
Youngest child		Festival Production
Breaking up		Waitressing
Renting apartments		Recruiting and Training
Being a friend		Personnel
Deciding on college
Deciding career
Being childless
Living miles from family
Losing friends
Making new friends
Dabbling with Tarot

Some experiences I think of as vocational are in the column headed social, such as hotel management.  My student’s experience of hotel management must have been more social than vocational when she made this inventory.  That is fine.  You do not have to have the experiences in the right column, so much as use the columns to brainstorm and list the extraordinary number of experiences you have had.

After you make your lists using columns, ask yourself which items in the columns generate passion for you right now.

Making Assertions
Once you have selected what I call “passion items” which are the items on our list that you feel are important to informing your experience write some assertions about them.  For instance, a passion for me is talking about how to raise children after divorce.  I assert, “A divorce can be the opportunity for parents to enrich their children’s emotional development.”  As soon as I write this assertion, I hear a chorus of voices disagreeing or getting upset or saying, “How can you say that?”

“Good!” I say to myself and the chorus of voices.  I have something to convince you of!  I know what my work is.

According to my assertion, I have to show you how divorce can offer the divorced parents an opportunity to raise emotionally enriched children.

Using Assertions as Blueprints for the Essay
Unlike writing the other essay styles, in argument and persuasion essays, you know your insight ahead of time.  Assertions are required in writing argument and persuasion essays.  They help you write them and act as blueprints for your essay.

According to my blueprints, I can support my assertion by using several styles of essay writing.  I can narrate anecdotes from the lives of my own children.  I can distinguish the characteristics necessary for good emotional development and show how they are present in the divorce.  I can contrast my experience raising children in one two-parent household with my experience of raising them in my single-parent household while sharing them with their dad’s household to show increased opportunities for my children’s emotional growth.

Stay Out of the Fog
Assertions are always statements, never incomplete sentences, never questions.  I could not write a strong argument if I merely wrote, “Raising children when you divorce.”  I could not write a strong argument if I merely asked, “Can a divorce be the opportunity for raising emotionally enriched children?”  My answer to that question is yes, but the word “yes” is not a blueprint–it doesn’t tell me the cause and effect or define emotional enrichment.  The answer to that question in a full sentence is an assertion.  My assertion keeps me focused on what I am going to say to back it up and on the order that will best help me support it.  The assertion is not only a blueprint; it is a lighthouse guiding me away from the rocks of illogic and incoherence.

Write the assertions you can think of concerning your passion items.  Select the assertion that most interests you.  There are two more exercises ahead before you start writing.

Supporting the Assertion
Your personal experience may include the following information to support your assertion or you might seek some of this information as you are writing:

1. the testimony of experts, authorities, and others who should know
2. statistics
3. comparisons of essential nature (an essay I read compared all of us who use up the planet’s resources to airplane mechanics who pop rivets off a plane say there are plenty more to keep the plane together)
4. the history of how something happened
5. the effects of something that happened
6. solutions to a problem
7. an account of the opposition’s argument (the chorus of voices I spoke about earlier) and way of thinking
8. your counter to that point of view.  By reporting opposing points of view, you show your astuteness and your respect for differences of opinion.  This invites readers to consider your opinion. Providing the opposition’s point of view credits you; it shows you have looked deeply into your situation.

To start developing your essay, write your assertion across the top of a blank page.  Then list the supports and evidences you might use in making your argument.

This process may have some surprises for you. Sometimes you’ll make an assertion you feel strongly about, but when you begin to support it, you’ll find you have more ammunition for the opposite side.  Well, switch sides then!