Teaching tips for persuasive writing
Tip 1: Teach broadly
Teaching persuasive writing is most effective within a broader writing program and a school-wide literacy program. Writing is about the communication of ideas, thoughts and feelings. Students need to learn about the power of writing to achieve its many purposes and then to acquire the knowledge and skills to develop that power for themselves.
To help students develop as writers, teachers need to come armed with:
• knowledge of a model of language and language development
• knowledge of the writer’s craft
• a repertoire of strategies for teaching, modelling and supporting writing.
Tip 2: Encourage student engagement
In teaching students persuasive writing, deal with "big ideas". Topics should interest and affect students. They should involve issues about which students, given their age and social roles, can develop their own opinions and speaking positions.
Discuss these issues with students to help them clarify their thinking. Ask questions about what they know and how they feel about the issue. Explore with them the social contexts of an issue and the audiences who will read about it. Then ask the elaborating questions – How do they know? Why is the issue important to them? Why should other people be persuaded to agree with them? In short, what is their stance? Working from a student’s thinking will foreground that student’s voice in the writing.
Tip 3: Teach from varied and authentic models
When students have a clear understanding of their own stance, discuss with them the textual choices they need to make with regard to text structure and other textual features. Introduce the typical texts associated with the issue. Analyse their content and form. The structures of authentic texts will rarely fit a "five paragraph essay" schema, which is one way to structure some functions of persuasive writing. Other models that can be presented to students include:
• describing a problem and developing a robust solution
• describing the causes and effects of different problems and the desired responses to them
• critiquing an opposing argument step by step to concede points, refute and ultimately reject the argument or, especially where a writer seeks to persuade an audience to take some action,
• describing emotively an event or circumstances which illustrates the problem to be solved and offering the solution.
Writing that has a strong writer’s voice, a logical and developed position or argument and mastery of the technical aspects will improve the writer’s social and personal effectiveness.
Incidentally, such writing will also score well in the NAPLAN test.