The persuasive mode
The purpose of a persuasive essay is, in part, to present information to your reader but, primarily to convince or persuade your reader that your views on a particular controversial topic are valid and legitimate. If you are asked to discuss the causes of the Iraq war, you will write an informative essay, but if you are asked how you feel about the UK’s involvement in the war, you will write a persuasive essay. Similarly, if you are asked to define post structuralism, you will write an informative essay, but if you are asked if you believe post structuralism is a viable method of literary analysis, you will write a persuasive essay.
Here, for example, is a paragraph from an essay in which the author is attempting to argue that angels are real entities who have been known to intervene in human lives. Notice how the author uses direct testimony to support his argument, an essential strategy for so contentious an argument.
More compelling proof that angels exist comes from reports of personal encounters some fortunate people have had. In an interview in the July, 2003 issue of Event Magazine retired naval officer Arthur Gilbert claimed he had been praying most of the day for his wife Grace, stricken with terminal cancer, when he got up to answer a knock at his door. According to Gilbert’s account: “There stood a very tall, black-skinned, blue-eyed man who identified himself as Michael and who told me that he had been sent by God to cure Grace.” Here Grace picks up and continues the story: “Michael simply moved his right hand toward me, palm outward, but did not touch me. I felt an incredible heat emanating from Michael’s hand, and I fainted. Then a strong white light, like one of those search lights, traveled through my body. I knew something supernatural was happening to me.” Grace’s amazed doctor told her two days later that there was not longer any sign of cancer in her body and admitted he had witnessed a medical miracle.
It is important to know your purpose. By clarifying your purpose in writing an academic essay, you must think about your topic, and, in doing so, you will generate ideas which should be useful to you when you begin to write. Moreover, by establishing your purpose, you begin to get some ideas about designing an effective structure for your essay as a whole. Your work will go more smoothly if you know why you are doing it.
Thinking about your topic
By considering the expectations of your reader and by determining your purpose for writing, you start to understand what you need to say in your academic essay and how you should express yourself. You also need to take some time to think about your topic, to determine what you know already about it. You might be surprised. You might know more about your topic than you think you do. You just need a couple of strategies which will help you mine your long-term memory to re-discover information you have learned in the past. There are several methods writers use to generate ideas. Among the most popular are freewriting and questioning.
Freewriting
Freewriting is a form of brainstorming on paper. It is a technique designed to help unblock the creative process by forcing you to write something—anything—about the subject of your assignment. The process is as follows. Using your assignment as a prompt, write non-stop for a limited period of time, usually about ten minutes. You write whatever comes into your mind without worrying about spelling, grammar, or any other aspects of ‘correct’ writing. No one but you sees your freewriting. After the ten minutes are up, you read your freewriting and extract from it ideas and information that might be useful to you as you write your essay. You can use these ideas as additional prompts and freewrite again and even a third time if you feel the exercise will yield results.
Freewriting is a good pre-writing exercise, but it can be used at any point during the writing process, whenever you get bogged down or blocked.
Questioning
Journalists are taught the W5 strategy as a way of generating ideas for a story they must cover. They are taught, in other words, to inform their readers about the who, what, when, where, and why (ie. the five W’s) of the event they are covering.
This strategy can be adapted to academic writing as well. When you have selected your topic, make up a list of W5 questions about it. Who will be reading this essay? What does he or she want from me? Who are the important people relevant to the topic? Where did important events related to my topic take place? What do I want to accomplish? When the events relevant to my topic take place? Why did events transpire as they did? Why is this subject important?
Some of these questions you will be able to answer and parts of those answers, at least, will eventually find their way into your essay. Some questions you will not be able to answer but by asking them you will, at least begin to focus your research. Research strategies are covered in detail in the next Chapter.
Composing your thesis statement
The end of the beginning of the writing process is the thesis statement. The thesis statement is an expression of the central or controlling idea of your entire essay. It is the essence of your academic essay, what would be left if you put your essay into a pot and boiled it down to its most essential component.
Your thesis might be very specific and incorporate the specific aspects of your topic. Here is an example of such a thesis statement:
To take good pictures, a photographer must pay attention to composition, lighting, and point of view.
Such a thesis is effective because it provides your reader with a blueprint, a mini-plan of the body of your essay. It suggests to the reader that those three points—composition, lighting, and point of view—will be developed in more detail in subsequent paragraphs.
For a more complex essay, however, a detailed thesis might be difficult to compose and hard to understand. For such essays, you might prefer a more general thesis, for example:
Today, the narrator of John Donne’s poem The Flea would likely face a charge of sexual harassment.
This thesis has a persuasive edge to it, which means the writer will have to acknowledge and refute opposing points then develop and support her own argument. Here a general thesis is preferable because a blueprint thesis would have to encompass so much, it would likely be unwieldy.
The thesis statement is often the final sentence of the introductory paragraph. It might be spread over two sentences if the essay is long and complex. Some excellent academic essays do not even contain a recognisable single-sentence thesis in their introductions, but the essay’s central idea will certainly be implicit within the essay’s introduction. Many professors, however, do like and expect to see a clear, written thesis, within the introduction of an academic essay.
Note, finally, that at this stage of the writing process, your thesis statement is preliminary. As you think more about your topic, do some research, write a few paragraphs, your central focus might change, and you might return to the beginning of your essay and alter your thesis.
A Case Study
Audrey is a second-year student at a university in London, and she is taking a course on the literature of Elizabethan England. Her professor assigns an essay of up to 2500 words on any topic relevant to the content of the course. Audrey has always loved Shakespeare’s sonnets and was intrigued by one of her professor’s lectures, which touched upon the possibility that the characters in the sonnets were real people whom the poet knew. She decides to write her essay on these possible prototypes for the characters in the sonnets.
As we have reviewed in this Chapter, to get started, Audrey needs to consider her reader, determine her purpose, and try some freewriting, all of which she hopes will lead to at least a preliminary thesis.
She begins by considering her reader
My reader is Professor Fareed, an expert in Elizabethan literature. Obviously, she knows Shakespeare’s inside and out. She’s not going to need me to explicate any of the poems for her. I’ve got to review the evidence that exists about who these sonnet characters were and present this evidence. She’s not going to appreciate any wild theories that amateur Shakespeareans might have developed. I’ve got to go for the authoritative information. I’ve got to restrict myself