Occam’s razor and your persuasive essay

The simplest explanation is often the correct one. In our case, the simplest explanation for your collective confusion is that you do not carefully read the instructions given to you, nor do you make effective use of the outlines or guidelines that accompany the instructions. You were given a calendar that covers the rest of the school year, and in it, you were shown this:

PERSUASIVE ESSAY: STUDENT‐DRIVEN RHETORIC Due date: 6/6/11 | Content: 100 points | Annotation: 50 points Directions: 1. Use the class discussion of rhetoric and persuasion in Animal Farm to set up 5/19 and 5/20. 2. On 5/19 and 5/20, complete a SOAPSTONE to set up your essay. 3. Write and revise your persuasive essay over the next two weeks. 4. Upload a copy to Turnitin.com. Then print a hard copy. 5. Annotate your own paper to identify the following: a. Appeals to pathos, logos, and ethos b. Other rhetorical strategies (e.g., rhetorical questioning, charged diction)

This is the persuasive essay. It is built on top of our study of Animal Farm, for which you have been given significant class time and generous directions; ultimately, you were responsible for using your careful reading of the novel to contextualize the characters’ use of persuasive rhetoric. You studied rhetoric when we read “A Modest Proposal,” a formal argument that we annotated together, after which you completed your own satirical argument. Animal Farm contains simple persuasion that uses the same tricks and techniques of formal persuasion.

The persuasive essay is also built on top of your research paper, which seems complicated only until it is carefully broken down according to instructions; once broken down, the research paper is a straightforward thesis‐driven essay, no different from your comparative analysis of The Invisible Man, except that this one uses online research to develop its ideas. You have a guide to validating websites that can be carried over into any research your persuasive essay requires.

To recap: You have the skills from The Invisible Man essay and all of the other writing and revision we have done this year, and now you are pooling that with four other elements to produce a persuasive essay:

From your study of Animal Farm From the research paper process

+ Notes on Persuasive Speeches: Data Gathering: SOAPSTONE, rhetorical appeals, etc. Website and Data Validity

+ +

From your study of “A Modest Proposal” + From your own “modest proposal”

Notes on Argument and Rhetoric: Feedback on Formal Argument: Rhetorical appeals, claims, tone, etc. Use of appeals, development of ideas

PERSUASIVE ESSAY

You control every element of the process and product here. This is on you. PROMPT IN BRIEF You choose the topic, the purpose, the structure, the details, even the speaker; be someone else, if you want. Whatever you do, you start by choosing an audience you would like to persuade either to 1. change their beliefs or mindset; or 2. take an action. Second, you will complete a SOAPSTONE outline for your essay, focusing on 1. what you know about your audience’s mood, relevant beliefs, and position; and 2. what kind of tone you will adopt as a result of that. Then you write your essay. Appeal to your audience through logic, emotion, and a sense of ethos—that is, your own character and trustworthiness or the authority of others. Use appropriate evidence and details, including research, to develop the reasoning behind your argument. Block off each main idea or reason as its own paragraph. Focus on using words that will influence your audience, especially verbs and adjectives.

PROCESS Let’s use a common subject as an example: legalizing marijuana. You will be steered away from this topic—not for the reasons you expect, but because it is difficult to execute well. You start with an idea: I will make them change their minds and legalize weed! So you leap to your SOAPSTONE sheet: SUBJECT: LEGALIZE WEED But who is your audience? There is no one who can make an illegal drug legal by waving a wand. Eventually, you will deduce that your target audience is one of the NY senators who might be able to introduce a bill to Congress arguing for the legalization of a controlled substance. So you leap back to your SOAPSTONE sheet: AUDIENCE: SENATOR But who is that? Not just the name, either. Is he a Democrat? What does that tell you? How did he grow up? What’s his stance on drugs? Where can you find that? And then you remember that you must persuade him either to 1. change his beliefs or mindset; or 2. take an action. You would have to deduce a senator’s beliefs from his statements or press releases, and that’s hard to do; as a politician, his real beliefs and core motivations are hard to pinpoint. Then you would need to research the anti‐drug legislation that exists, especially recently. And then you mount an attack against all of that—knowing that your goal, in the end, is just to have him introduce a bill. The research into New York State anti‐drug legislation, drug‐related crime, and incidental effects of drug use alone would take you a while; and while you should be using the research paper prompt to hone those skills, the focus here is how to persuade someone. You might find it easier to choose a topic with a more local audience. For example, let’s say that you would like the school to stop using bells, like it did when we had AP exams happening. Who is your audience? Here, you don’t have to go far: your principals. And while you may not have access to their hearts and minds, you do know quite a bit about their moods, beliefs, and mindsets. They are in education; they want to insure the wellbeing of their students; they value learning and safety over everything else; and so on. So when you go to fill in the AUDIENCE portion of your outline, you can write a lot, and all of it will be pertinent. As you continue to brainstorm, you can also begin to think about the tone you want to adopt, how to convey that tone, and how to appeal to them: through logic, through emotional imagery, through a discussion of the trustworthiness of students when given responsibility…

USE ANIMAL FARM The persuasion in the novel is simple: The pigs lie to animals who are motivated by fear, desire for comfort, vanity, or desire for indepdence. They know that audience. The questions they ask, the threats they make, the language they use: All of it is designed to manipulate the rest of the farm. The pigs recognize the audience’s mood; they slowly change the audience’s beliefs; and then they convince the audience to take action against themselves. You are not being asked to take over your community and run it like Communist Russia, but you should take a lesson from what Orwell writes. Focus on choosing the right subject, the right audience, and the right purpose. Then you can really focus on writing a convincing argument.