Warm-Up for Promoting a Cause
One way that persuasive writing can empower you is to help you promote an important cause.
How Can I Promote a Cause?
You can promote a cause by showing readers how it will help them or help others. To convince readers, you must give solid reasons and express your ideas clearly. In this unit, you will be asked to write an essay that persuades others to support a cause that you believe in.
“Save the whales!” “Alba Moreno for class president!” “Reduce, reuse, recycle!” These statements are more than just slogans that you might see on campaign posters or advertisements. They also identify worthy causes—helping an intelligent species, electing a candidate, and recycling. Almost everyone supports one worthy cause or another. When you support a cause, you express your belief about something. When you try to get others to support your belief, you use persuasion.
In this unit, you will be asked to write an essay that persuades others to support a cause that you believe in.
Thinking About Opinions
People have all kinds of opinions and all kinds of reasons for their opinions. An opinion is a statement that reveals your thoughts or feelings about something. It involves a judgment. (For example, you may like or dislike asparagus.)
Write opinions.
For each sentence starter below, choose "like" or "don't like," provide a topic, and write your reason after "because."
- I like/don’t like because . . .
- I like/don’t like because . . .
- I like/don’t like because . . .
- I like/don’t like because . . .
- I like/don’t like because . . .
Teaching Tip
Help students realize that opinions are personally held beliefs that can't be directly proven true, while facts can be proven true. For example, if a classroom is 70 Fahrenheit, the temperature is a fact that can be proven. One student might feel it is too cold, and another might feel it is too warm. Those ideas are opinions, because they cannot be specifically proven.
Creating Opinion Statements
You can most powerfully express your opinion by creating an opinion statement. An opinion statement shares your specific opinion about an interesting topic.
- Specific topic: basketball
- Thought or feeling: constant action makes it exciting
- Opinion statement: The constant action in basketball makes it one of the most exciting pro sports.
Create opinion statements.
For each opinion you wrote in the previous activity, write the topic and a specific thought or feeling. Then combine the two into an opinion statement.
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Topic
Thought or feeling
Opinion statement -
Topic
Thought or feeling
Opinion statement -
Topic
Thought or feeling
Opinion statement -
Topic
Thought or feeling
Opinion statement -
Topic
Thought or feeling
Opinion statement