Many schools have become stuck in their writing instruction. Students are graduating having written countless persuasive essays. When it is suggested that perhaps students have had enough practice at that type of writing, the response is sometimes that the students are not yet proficient at it.
I'd suggest that if, after writing 6 to 8 persuasive essays in four years, students haven't reached proficiency yet, imagine how much work all the other types of writing need. The literary analyses, research and scientific writing, narrative and expository writing, poetry, and many other types are largely going unaddressed. Often, even when we assign something we call a research paper, there is a persuasive essay built into it.
Also, it's a solid backup plan, but the 5-paragraph essay should be in the rearview mirror by the time a student leaves middle school. It's a great format to learn in fifth grade, but writers should grow beyond it. If someone ordered me to write an essay during my lunch break, I'd go to the 5-paragraph essay, but 18-year-olds in an honors class should be rising well above that bar. It is to writing what a net is to a trapeze artist. No one goes to a circus to watch the Flying Febrecci Family napping in the net.
I'll make a pitch for teaching the writing of fiction now, and not only in an elective class. We live in a society where even good people collect and distribute information and misinformation as quickly as they can. They try to persuade, just as they did with the predominant writing assignments in high school. However, it is when we create characters, and therefore must get into the heads of the people we are creating, that we can develop empathy for people. It forces the writer to imagine others thinking and feeling, hoping and wondering, imagining and realizing.
The writing of persuasive essays teaches us how to package information in a straightforward way that we hope will convince another person that we are right. The writing of fiction can do that as well- we can even camouflage our message in a Trojan horse of storytelling- but fiction writing forces the writer to do more emotional work.
Even if all we want to do is deliver our argument to others, it's almost always more effective built into fiction. People often quickly put down an essay they disagree with, but if the point is built into an interesting story with sympathetic characters, the reader might finish and get the full dose of our ideas.
If we must keep compelling our students to attempt to convince others of one thing or another, what if we taught them to attempt it in a piece of fiction, instead of getting them to write one more persuasive essay? That way, they get to put forward a point of view, while simultaneously stretching those empathy muscles as they craft characters.
Worth a try?
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