Inside Language, Literacy, and Content [Level D]

Focus on Genre: Persuasive Writing

• Argument
• Support

Writers of persuasive writing try to convince readers to agree with their position, viewpoint, or opinion on an issue. Persuasive writing includes newspaper editorials, speeches, and advertisements. By analyzing a piece of persuasive writing, you can decide whether or not you agree with it, and form your own opinions about the topic.

How It Works

Persuasive writers often state their position, or argument, and follow it up with support, or reasons, why readers should agree with them. Readers need to evaluate the support before making a decision.

• Look for support you can trust. Trustworthy evidence includes facts, statistics, opinions of experts, and details from personal experience that try to sway the reader.
• Watch out for reasons that don’t help prove the writer’s position, such as facts that don’t relate to the issue, or unsupported inferences.

Study this passage to learn more about argument and support.

Rescue the Rain Forest

The Amazon rain forest is in big trouble. The writer’s argument

Since the 1960s, people have cut down millions of trees to build farms, roads, and airports. The result is that the rain forest once covered almost 2.7 million square miles, but today covers only about 1.5 million square miles.

The writer’s support: statistics and facts

“Any changes that happen here have a great influence on whether the Earth gets warmer,” says Professor Philip Fernside of Brazil’s National Institute for Amazon Research.

Expert opinion

I’ve just come back from Brazil, and I now know that we need to protect the animals and plants that live there. So if you really care about the environment, join me in giving to the Rescue the Rain Forest fund!

Personal experience and inference