E 2

Assignment A- Persuasive Writing

When attempting to persuade our audience of something—whether it is

attempting to get your significant other try takeout from that new place down the

street or you are convincing the President of the US to invade a country— we are

called upon to make rhetorical choices that shift depending upon the rhetorical

situation. Recall that different audiences (along with topics) are going to require the

deployment of different strategies. How you slice and dice what ever combination

ethos/pathos/logos makes sense in the moment is up to you.

Keep this in mind as you choose the topic for “Assignment A

,” the persuasive

essay.

This essay is to be written as a three part essay: Intro/thesis, body paragraphs,

conclusion. To successfully complete this essay you will need to choose a topic. It

needs to be topic you can write a well researched essay about and be about a topic

about which reasonable minds might disagree. I recommend choosing something

that is political or social in nature. However, if there is an issue that you want to

write your paper on that might not be considered “social or political,” you can feel

free to write it, but you will still be obligated to conduct thorough research and

assemble a strong argument. For example, you might have a hard time writing an

academically rigorous paper about why pineapple on pizza is wrong. If you have any

issues figuring out a topic I can help you.

“Assignment A” must have a

minimum of four sources

. These sources

should be evaluated by you and have been deemed acceptable for an academic

paper.

As you construct your paper think about how you might successfully utilize

the various strategies we have talked about in the class. You will need to lean on

some expert opinions (ethos), but you’ll want to back those informed opinions with

some verifiable facts (logos) too, right? Maybe at just the right moment you will

want to play to your audience’s sympathies or fears (pathos)? All of these in

combination will help to create a strong argument. It is up to you to calculate the

proper mixture.

So that the audience (me) does not believe you to be toxically blinded by

your own bias (Of course we are all somewhat prejudiced towards our own opinion.

This can not be helped.) you should be sure to mention the strongest argument(s)

against your position. Your argument should then take some time to refute these

arguments throughout your paper. This needn’t be too obvious or self conscious

(e.g. “At this point in my essay I will refute my opponent’s argument:”), but your

argument should address these attacks either directly or indirectly.

You are allowed to use first person pronouns for this essay.

The minimum

page length of this essay is three pages.

That does not include the required

work cited page in this MLA formatted essay. Be sure to include in-text citations.