How to Write a Persuasive Essay – A Full Guide to Make It Clear

The modern world is full of digitalized features. However, writing skills are still primarily the prerogative of people over artificial intelligence. To develop and widen writing skills, students in colleges are frequently assigned to write multiple papers. A persuasive essay is among the widespread writing assignments with many particularities. This article will give you tips on how to start a persuasive essay and structure it. You will get persuasive essay examples and more hacks.

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What is a persuasive essay?

The core purpose of writing a persuasive essay is to convince the audience to join the author’s point of view to a particular problem, event, personality, phenomenon, etc. Using a specific method, the author should appeal to readers’ emotions and convince them to change their opinion or make particular actions connected to essay problematics.

What is the difference between an argumentative and persuasive essay?

To create persuasive articles, you need to realize the difference between argumentative and persuasive essays. Each essay’s goal is similar – the author should persuade the audience to join his or her side. However, for an argumentative essay, facts and logic matter the most, when for a persuasive essay, the central part will be about appealing to feelings, emotions, and irrational actions.

How to write a persuasive essay?

There are several particularities of writing to consider that make any persuasive essay resonate. Among them are the following:

Attitude comes first

In the beginning, you should form your own opinion on the essay’s subject. We recommend investigating the area or problematic you will reflect on in your persuasive essay before choosing a particular topic. If you find out more about your own beliefs related to the essay problematics, you will get the ability to expose your natural feelings and emotions coming from your heart. People can read between the lines. Make sure not underestimate your audience. By defining your position first, you will make the whole process of writing a persuasive essay plain and straightforward.

Select an effective topic

For a persuasive essay, the topic is crucial. To pick an effective topic, you should consider your audience as you would address them, and then convince them to join your side or act in a particular way. Suppose you can choose from several topics provided in the instructions from your teacher. In that case, we recommend selecting the area that is familiar to you and recalls some honest feelings, as you will build a defense of your point of view appealing to people’s emotions and subconscious. Another essential feature of the topic – it must be sharp enough to have opposite points of view, and you will confront the opposing thoughts with your arguments.

How to start a persuasive essay?

We recommend starting your paper with an effective outline that you will widen and polish in the next stages of writing. Proceed with the following steps:

Structure patiently

An effective persuasive essay outline is not simply several short lines introducing the paper’s section names. We recommend you widen the outline to make it a working first draft of your future essay.

When it comes to persuasive essay outlining, you can face two main situations:

• When the recommended structure is already pre-planned for you by a teacher or professor – in such case, you can find the recommended outline sample in the instructions.
• When creating an outline by yourself from scratch, in this situation, a teacher does not provide the outline sample and wants you to show your ability to structure essays.

Here are the main sections of a persuasive essay outline:

Introductory section

Speaking on an introduction of a persuasive essay, consider adding several vital points. First, you need to include a transparent and precisely formulated thesis statement. It must cover the essay’s problematics and reflect the core points that you will provide in the following paragraphs of your paper. The second vital point in an introductory section is a hook. It will help if you remember that your central aim is appealing to readers’ feelings. Creating an emotional hook will compel your readers to continue reading your statements to the end.

Body section

One of the peculiarities of a persuasive essay body is that it must contain several paragraphs logically bound to each other. Also, a paragraph with an opposite point of view will make all the arguments listed in previous paragraphs more vibrant. It is essential to add a paragraph with an opposing opinion with refutations supported by arguments. Note that you must appeal to readers’ feelings proving that the opposite opinion is wrong.

Conclusion section

Among the vital features of a persuasive essay conclusion is restating the main thesis. The best way to do it is to appeal to the most potent arguments you have listed above by artificially paraphrasing them. Your goal is to reinforce your ideas by appealing to your audience’s feelings and emotions and encourage them to join your point of view. Do not add any new data in the conclusion of the persuasive essay.

Persuasive essay formatting

Your persuasive essay format will be defined by instructions that you will receive from your teacher. The formats can be the following:

1) APA – it is a widespread format for social studies related essays, especially for essays on psychology and sociology. It requires using the author-date format of citations.
2) MLA – it is a format widely used for essays written on culture, art, languages, and other similar disciplines. The style of citation is author-page number.
3) Chicago/Turabian – it is a format for papers that allows using two ways of citation: notes-bibliography and author-date.

Edit and polish your paper

When you proceed with the editing stage, you will work on two core elements: content and grammar. Start with content and re-read all the statements at least two times. If there will be any repeated arguments, restate them or simply delete them. To make a persuasive essay effective and convenient, you need to connect each paragraph logically to another, letting the thoughts flow freely. Grammar editing is another crucial step that is obligated for those who are about to write an A-grade persuasive essay.

Here is a persuasive essay example to give you a hint

Was Greta Thunberg Wrong?

Greta Thunberg is the seventeen-year-old Swedish girl known all around the world to be one of the most tenacious activists surrounding the effect of human activity on global warming. Greta addressed the UN Climate Summit in New York back in September 2019, providing alarming statements regarding the future of mankind on this planet. As a matter of fact, Ms. Thunberg was not entirely wrong, as most of her allegations were backed up by scientific facts: more frequent natural disasters killing thousands in the last two decades, rising temperatures worldwide, and dramatic CO2 emission rates. All these facts provide substantial proof that climate change needs to be considered as a true emergency.

“People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction.” This is one of the first alarming claims made by Greta during her speech at the United Nations. Multiple scientific papers confirm that in the last 10-20 years, natural catastrophes have been on the rise and have been mostly associated to implications with climate change. According to Cornese et al., “climate change has been convincingly linked to an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters in many regions.” Recent natural calamities, such as bushfires in California, the Amazon, and the Australian continent in the past three years, are all living proof of the current environmental crisis. Other alarming effects of climate change are beginning to appear, gradually changing the world as we know it. A few weeks ago, on February 6th, Antarctica registered its highest temperature ever recorded in history. The episode was thoroughly described by meteorologist Matthew Cappucci, with an article on The Washington Post. Cappucci also stated that “In just the past 50 years, temperatures have surged a staggering 5 degrees in response to Earth’s swiftly warming climate.”

These are just a few shocking signs, which undoubtedly support the alarmism of Ms. Thunberg. To sum it up, Greta was not wrong, as her claims are backed up by up-to-date data, numbers, and facts. Even though her words might have been provocative during her speech in New York, her arguments validated the accuracy of her scientific knowledge regarding this delicate matter.

Works Cited

Cappucci, Matthew. “Antarctica just hit 65 degrees, its warmest temperature ever recorded.” The Washington Post, 7 February 2020, washingtonpost.com.
Coronesea, Lampertia, Kellerc, Chiaromontea, and Roventinia. “Evidence for sharp increase in the economic damages of extreme natural disasters.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 116, no. 43, Oct. 2019.

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