It makes no difference if you need a persuasive essay for college, an exam, or just for your blog. Such a position paper is supposed to enhance your point of view by providing crystal clear evidence regarding your ideas. Everything you say must support the position – biased, but still realistic.
While tweets and posts make a good choice to express an idea (everyone does it), writing a convincing essay is more challenging than that. Here are a few helpful tips to ensure a perfect piece of work that no one can ignore.
Organization Is Key
A successful essay is one that convinces your audience. To do that, you must be perfectly organized. If you lack this aspect, nothing is going to happen. Everything begins with a crystal clear statement, which introduces your readers to the actual paper.
From that point on, you need to come up with a logical format. Throw out evidence and analyses in an organized manner – make sure everything is linked together and avoid changing the topic too often.
Doing it off the top of your head is a terrible idea. Not even the best writers in the world will do it. Instead, you need to list the most important points and subheadings before adding the text. It is like a sketch.
Do It for Your Audience
Your persuasive essay is supposed to target a particular audience. You do not write for a book or search engines, but for people to read your work. Therefore, make sure you keep the audience in mind.
Who are you trying to convince? Each type of audience comes with particular necessities and demands. Perhaps you are trying to convince your colleagues. Maybe you want to interact with some old conservatives. What about their education? How about their preferences?
If you do this for school, your professor will read it, but here comes a major mistake many amateurs make – they write for their professors. Your professor will read your work, but the audience is different.
Keep Your Position Clear
Everyone appreciates a nice story, but this is not a story. It is a persuasive essay, so treat it accordingly and follow the rules associated with this type of writing. Stay away from obscure elements, surprising endings, or ambiguous stories. You want everything to be clear.
It is also important for the audience to know what you are pursuing, so make your position clear in the beginning. If your readers struggle to understand your position, your persuasive piece of work has already failed.
It is also a good idea to restate the position every once in a while, but do not let this aspect be your convincing argument. Instead, the role of restating it implies remembering your readers where you are and why you use certain arguments.
Passion Is a Must
The greatest orators of all time had a passion – even the ones that caused disasters. Whether it comes to work, school, or hobbies, you tend to do good things when you love what you do. The same rule applies here – if you want to do a persuasive essay, choose a topic that you love.
The general idea is fairly simple – if you like something, you are more passionate about it. You have some experience and half the research is already done… You will not do it because you have to, but because you love to.
With all these, try to make the difference between passion and emotions. It is one thing to be passionate about a topic and a different thing to use bias and anger during an argument.
Manage Your Integrity
A successful argument or debate is based on more components and integrity is one of them. Ethical reasoning implies keeping things clear. Do not attempt to manipulate. If you mislead, you lose.
Any kind of misinformation, fear techniques, or fallacy will turn your piece of work into a worthless piece of manipulation if you end up losing your integrity. You do not need to trick anyone, but to provide evidence that your point of view is worth some attention.
The bottom line, a persuasive essay has many aspects and trust is one of the most important ones. Keep it clear and gain trust and there is no way to fail in this venture.