Persuasive Research Essay Instructions
Your assignment is to write a research-based persuasive/argument essay. It should follow MLA Guidelines, include at least three secondary sources, use in-text citation,
include a Works Cited page, and come to 1000 words or 4 full pages of your own writing.
Word count, of course, isn’t the same as word quality. Quotations don’t count.
Your subject is Climate Change. You need to narrow to a sub-topic and to find a target audience.
Your target audience is a tool to make your job easier. The more qualifications you add (gender, age, pay, location, marital status, etc.) the more chances you give yourself to appeal to them.
Your target audience tells you what to look for and how to frame what you find.
The first mistake that students make is to blow off using Opposing Viewpoints.
Luckily, you are required to use Opposing Viewpoints for this class. Find the link in the navigation page on the left side of our homepage.
You will not only find the subject but hundreds of sub-topics related to it, all with accompanying articles, graphs, and polls. Each article is summarized. Each sub-topic is seen from various points of view.
So: Consult Opposing Viewpoints to help you find a sub-topic, something relating to land, air, sea, any affected creatures, etc. If you don’t, you fail the assignment.
Climate Change>Air Pollution
Then you must narrow again: Climate Change>Air Pollution>Combustion engines>gas-powered lawnmowers and leaf-blowers.
Continue narrowing until you find a manageable field of knowledge, one you can write about intelligently and persuasively in only 4 pages:
CC>AP>Gas engines>Virginia Beach, and so on.
You will also narrow to (and for) your audience as well.
Persuade the new owner of a lawn service company that he needs to give his people push-mowers and rakes to help save the sky. You know their answer already.
Persuade your meat-eating friend to cut back on beef.
Every audience has wants and needs. Address them.
Bring the larger topic to the kitchen table.
You can formulate a research question: Do we burn more energy during Daylight Savings Time? What is happening to the polar bears and can we save their habitat?
You can read the newspapers for a suitable incident to find common ground. “Last night at the Oscars,” “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy”
You can go to the Virginian-Pilot for stories, incidents, etc.
You will be doing what you’ve been watching others do: trying to move a particular audience.
How will you sell your argument, make it stick, connect? Tell a story? Give some numbers? Make comparisons? List examples? Will you scare us, relieve us?
Get started.
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