Unit 7: Persuasive Essay
The aim of this 4-6 page essay is to draw on all the rhetorical skills you have been building in this course so far in order to write a persuasive essay. For this paper, you’ll need to choose an issue you care about and take a rhetorically effective stance on the issue. Note the potential relationship between the persuasive essay and the advocacy project. Ideally some of the work you do on your persuasive essay might feed in some way into your advocacy project, though you’re more than welcome to tackle two entirely different topics/causes in the persuasive essay and the advocacy project.
The boundaries of this assignment are more or less wide open: your task, generally speaking, is to produce a piece of persuasive writing of shape, style, and tone appropriate for your target audience. As I’ve said repeatedly in class, I particularly want to emphasize writing that embraces the possibilities of creativity and invention as methods of surmounting difficult rhetorical obstacles. What I mean is this: what aspects of the rhetorical situation into which you’re entering might make a “traditional” (five-paragraph/garden variety op-ed/policy paper/letter to the editor/first-year English paper) essay ineffective? How are you going to invent your way around those difficult aspects? How will your essay differ from every other essay on this topic? Will it use an aggressive, manifesto-ish tone? Will it do interesting things with typography or visual form? Will it incorporate personal narrative or verse or fiction as a way of making an argument in an unexpected way? One of the things most of a year of blogging has done for your writing is open it up to modes of expression and communication that don’t match the kinds of dull, impersonal, rote writing that fatigues you to write and everyone to read. How might you marshal the energy of the writing you do on your blogs to produce a persuasive essay that pushes through rhetorical and political inertia to really sway opinions on some issue of consequence? How might your persuasive essay jump off the page in a way the phrase “persuasive essay” might suggest is unlikely? How will you surprise your audience into listening to and taking seriously what you have to say?
It’s important that this paper have a well defined audience, which might include a specific venue—will the paper take the form of a Sunday Times Op-ed piece? A short article in your favorite music magazine? A piece in a local mainstream or alternative paper? An Onward State blog post? When thinking about audience, ask yourself, “who cares about this issue?” And perhaps more importantly, “who should care about this issue?” And, ultimately, “who can help change the shape of this issue? Who do I need to reach in order to get things done?”
For this paper you’ll not only want to pay attention to the rhetorical situation and what appeals might work with your audience, you’ll also need to attend to arrangement and style and how these rhetorical concerns overlap, along with other aspects of rhetorical situations such as kairos and ethos.
Before you turn in the paper, I will give you an opportunity to discuss the rhetorical choices you’ve made, so be aware of your strategies as you compose.
The goals of this assignment are as follows:
- To demonstrate cumulative rhetorical skills, including an awareness of rhetorical situation, including the ability to identify the “stasis” or the place where an issue is ready for persuasive argument.
- To deploy rhetorical proofs when necessary in support of a persuasive case.
- To attend to matters of rhetorical style, arrangement (order of arguments), and tone in order to connect appropriately and effectively with the audience.
- To convey a sense of commitment to the issue by offering inventive and compelling arguments—e.g., not just going through argumentative motions.