Tuesday 18 October 2011

Persuasive Essay Ideas

However, what you consider to be good persuasive essay ideas need not necessarily be considered to be good ideas by your readers. Ideas are just one part in the persuasion exercise. The other part is how strongly you feel about persuading your readers to accept your point of view and act on it. If you are sufficiently passionate about persuading your reader the chances are that you will succeed. Therefore for an essay to be effectively persuasive you need to have a persuasive idea that your readers feel sufficiently strong about. Then you should be sufficiently psyched about the idea for you to sway your readers to abcept your arguments.
Persuasive essays and argumentative essays are very similar to each other. The significant difference between the two is that in a persuasive essay the writer not only persuades readers to accept a view point but also attempts to make readers take some specific action. If writers are to do this then the arguments they put forth must be strong, sustainable and sufficiently compelling.
As in the case of other essays writers of persuasive essays must also have a plan with which to work. At the planning stage writers should remember that readers should feel sufficiently strong about the topic in focus, otherwise the whole exercise will be futile. It is quite likely that readers already have some sort of fixed notions about the topic. Writers have the additional task of guessing readers' bias and beliefs, and use this knowledge to wean them away from their biases, counter their objections and finally persuade readers to consider and accept a view point that is different from their own.
Guessing readers emotions about a certain subject should not be the same as guesswork. It should be a studied guess. To do this with any degree of accuracy writers have to research the subject sufficiently, study existing proposals, understand popular mood relating to the topic and assess if all of the objections are surmountable. To overcome objections, writer's persuasive ideas should be sufficiently defensible. The stronger the evidence that writers have in support of their argument, the higher are the chances that they will be able to effectively put across their ideas.
From what has been said persuasive essay ideas that stand a fair chance of doing what they are expected to do, need to pass a few tests. The first test of an effective idea is if the idea is seen as important enough for readers to get involved. If this is not so then you will lose the battle even before it has begun. The next test is that the biases readers have about the subject should not be very strong. Their objections to new ideas should not be insurmountable. And lastly is the idea sufficiently defensible. That is writers should have sufficient evidence to prove their point of view. This evidence can be in the form of expert opinion, personal experience, data and statistics and parallel situations that writers can cite.

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