1 of 21

Write now Article Tools

When you write a persuasive essay, keep your purpose in mind: to convince an audience to embrace your idea or point of view.

Here are the steps in writing a persuasive essay:

1.) Identify your argument. Your purpose is to persuade your audience to accept an idea or point of view.

You will need first to decide what your thesis, or argument, is. What do you want your readers to agree with you about?

Arguments consist of a thesis that is supported by claims. Each claim has evidence in the form of data or well-reasoned argumentation that supports the claim. The stronger the support, the better the claim. The better the claim, the more likely that readers will accept your argument, or thesis.

Readers are more important in persuasive writing than many others. You really need to know your audience, which takes us to step 2.

2.) Who do you want to convince? Identify your audience. After you know who your audience will be, consider what this audience believes, knows, and thinks. What forms of evidence and which arguments will persuade this audience?

Writing effective persuasion requires a good understanding of your audience. For example, if you want to convince a group of psychologists about a new therapy technique, you need to know if the psychologists are classical Freudian in their approach, or behaviorists, or researchers. Even for a seemingly limited group, such as "psychologists," there are many possible audiences!

If your audience consists of Freudian psychologists, your arguments and evidence for the therapy technique have to fit a Freudian framework and the technique needs to be described consistently with Freudian therapy. Similarly, for behaviorists you would need a behavioral framework and the technique should be described consistently with behavioral techniques. The researchers are going to want well-researched data and experimental studies as evidence of the efficacy of your new technique, and a description that makes it easily repeated in future research.

So it is with every audience, not just psychologists. The readers of your persuasive essay come to it with their own preset ideas and expectations of what makes a good argument. They have preconceptions as well. As a writer, you have to consider these in deciding which arguments, evidence, data, and approach will best support your thesis.

Besides what was mentioned above, consider: are readers hostile to your point of view? Or, are readers undecided about the issue? Perhaps you are persuading readers who agree

• 1
• 2
• 3
• next page >>

Add your voice

Know something about The power of persuasion: How to improve your persuasive writing?
We want to hear your view. Write now!