Effecting Change: Persuasive Genres

In this chapter, a persuasive text has the primary purpose of convincing their audience to change their ideas and behavior.

Yes, the traditional 5-paragraph essay provides structure, but it is presented too rigidly. No room for rhetorical purpose, topics, arguments, author innovations.

5 Principles

• Design compelling, communicatively meaningful environments
• Provide exposure and experience
• Explicitly teach genre features
• Explicitly teach genre-specific strategies
• Offer ongoing coaching and feedback

1. Compelling Environment

Compelling Environment

• Turn students' attention toward school, community, and the world
• Help them find something they want to change

2. Exposure & Experience

Exposure & Experience

• Introduce texts & problems that get students thinking
• Read about young local change-makers
• Help students see that almost any kind of writing can be used to persuade
• Use model and mentor texts

3. Genre Features

First, teach to evaluate the type of question in dispute:
*question of fact
*question of value
*question of policy

Content Characteristics

• claim
• evidence
• warrants*
• appeals*

Structural Characteristics

• compelling opening
• explication of context
• counterarguments
• refutations
• qualifications or constraints
• conclusion

Language Characteristics

• direct address
• questions for reader
• periodic restatement of claim
• Show solidarity with reader (we)
• Show opposition (they, them)
• Transitions that signal opposition (but, however, instead); logical links (because); qualifiers (sometimes)

Graphical Characteristics

• Pictures that evoke an emotional response
• Devices such as maps, charts, table, etc.

*Warrants & Appeals

Warrants

• Link between the claim & its evidence
• Most are not explicitly stated & hard for adults to pick out
• Empower teachers to talk with students about assumptions that underlie arguments & why some arguments are stronger than others
• George Hillocks & Stuart Yeh

Appeals

• Appeal to the speaker's credibility (ethos)
• Appeal to the audience's desires and needs (pathos)
• Appeal to reasoning and evidence (logos)

4. Genre Strategies

Common Troubles with Beginners

• Taking different perspectives on an issue
• Aligning the evidence with reasoning
• Lack of background knowledge

Strategies

• Learn about the audience & their considerations
• Craft an argument
• Build students' knowledge base!
• Read about & discuss differing perspectives

5. Coaching & Feedback

Coaching

• Working in groups leverages peer to peer coaching: kids will question a source; point to a likely interpretation; clear up misconceptions
• Use guiding questions/ heuristics to help students examine their work from a variety of angles

"If you make your classroom an environment in which students are used to bringing up and discussing what is going on in the world, if you listen carefully o their reasoning and help them understand their own and others' perspectives, and if you offer them chances to read and compose texts in an effort to influence a variety of audiences, your students will have greater knowledge of the world outside the classroom and of themselves as effective actors in it."
(Duke, p. 162)