What does it take to write persuasively and to move others to read and stay interested in your point-of-view?  What does it take to write to change their thinking and behavior?

Eda La Shan, the early childhood specialist, once said something about dealing with children that I remember when writing argument-and-persuasion essays.  She said that children and adults are most alike in their feelings and least alike in their thinking.  How often we tell children to calm down and behave without finding out what they are feeling that is causing them to fidget or to whine.  If we start first with identifying feelings (“What is troubling you?”), and we address those feelings (“Yes, it must be uncomfortable to sit here when your feet don’t reach the floor.”), then we can “fix” the situation (“Here, I’ll move over. Why don’t you put your legs up on the seat for awhile?”).

In essay writing, this need to address feelings before presenting solutions translates into two ideas.  First, 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.

“Growing up in the U.S. makes one predisposed to cultural arrogance, a sense that our culture is not only different but better than others, a belief that everyone else should speak English but that it is not necessary for us to speak their languages,” wrote Alan Guskin, President of Antioch University, in the Fall, 1991 issue of The Antiochian. This very predisposition is so internalized that even inside our country, inside our own families, we are unaware of how this “cultural snobbism” blocks effective communication.  This predisposition diminishes our ability to consider other people’s points of view, the validity and historical roots of their view.  We might not even recognize there is room for these differences.  In addition, sometimes we don’t know if our point-of-view is obtained through our own experience, or whether it is an untested, unverified, soaked-in-by-osmosis piece of cultural snobbism.

The points of view you can most persuasively argue and present in the hopes of having others understand come directly from your experience.  If you have lived something, you are an something of an authority. But you must examine your experience closely to find out what you have really come to know and believe.  The argument and persuasion essay provides a strategy for accomplishing this.  First you see the underpinnings of your opinion, and then you open the door for another to go your way if they are willing.

 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.

Before you write an argument and persuasion essay, ask yourself if you have enough experience in that area to inform others and change their thinking or actions. You might have experience divorcing, parenting, waitressing, fighting wars, or coping with illness, for example, and experience may have taught you to do some things differently from the way you used to or the way other people do it.  It may have taught you to change the way you think.

Here is a procedure to help you mine such material:

Conduct a Survey

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.

Here’s a sample from a young woman in her twenties:

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.

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.

Unlike in writing other essay styles, assertions are required in writing argument and persuasion essays.  They direct the layout of your essay.

I can see my essay will layout with anecdotes from the lives of my own children.  I will distinguish the characteristics necessary for good emotional development and show how they are present in the divorce.  I will 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.

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 provides not only a layout plan; 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.

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!

Now that you have written your assertion and thought up supports for it, decide on the order you will use to present the supports for a powerful argument.  A good strategy is to put your strongest support first and tuck in the weakest next.  Then you can put your third strongest support in and after that your second strongest.  This will help you get the reader’s attention and keep it.  You don’t want to let your argument wind down or fizzle out by exhausting your best arguments first.

After you develop your argument based on your first round of response, get additional response.  Then you might want to leave this piece alone for several days.  When you come back to it, are you still persuaded?  Does this writing represent what you believe?  Can you see the importance of what you have lived now that you have written it in this style?