Before we started this Explaining and Defending a Point of View assignment, we experimented with developing stronger persuasive writing by sharing your individual attempts through Socrative. It was useful to use that app because then everyone’s examples could be read through, and chuckled at, but it allowed for a real-time review and discussion of which Persuasive responses were stronger and then what about the sentences made them stronger.

So the value of that activity isn’t diminished to that one-time activity, here’s the pdf with all your responses collected together.

They’re in random order and there’s no notes with it to indicate the sentences we thought were stronger/more persuasive. See if you can determine for yourself what comes across as a more confident and persuading response under each topic!

A3.1 Assignment – practice developing persuasive tone in writing – socrative samples

More Help Developing Persuasive Tone

This web link here opens an easy-to-understand handout that describes the following ways to improve persuasive tone:

• Using personal pronouns: you, I, me, we, us makes writing more human
• Appeal to the head: logic and common sense
• Appeal to the heart: create feelings of fear, guilt, empathy to move the reader
• Hard evidence: facts, statistics, data cannot be refuted easily
• Soft evidence: expert opinions, examples relevant to topic to demonstrate point
• Incentives: includes rewards for the consumer/reader
• Humour: can be used to disarm the reader, so they are not so defensive and warm up to your opinion
• Emotive language: using strong language to express a personal opinion needs to be written in a sophisticated way to stay credible
• Poetic devices: alliteration, similes, metaphors capture/maintain a reader’s attention
• Rhetorical questions: a hypothetical question used at the beginning can get the reader thinking about a topic
• Imperatives: using commanding language to drive the point home (must stand up) usually used at end of writing once trust is gained