Persuasive Essay

You are working on ;the rough draft of your paper this week. ; Your book guides you through the creation of a rough draft with an exercise. ; Your paper should be set up as a paper, however, and not as answers to those questions provided in your book. ; In other words, your paper should be submitted and be formatted as any formal paper. ; It should have required APA formatting, an introduction with your thesis statement, body paragraphs, an acknowledgement of the counterargument, and a conclusion paragraph. ; Additionally, it should have fully formatted in text citation and a works cited/references page. ; Your final paper is required to be 5-7 pages, so I would try and get as close to that 5 page minimum as you can. ; The more work you put into your paper this week, the more comments I can make for its improvement before the final draft. ; I look forward to reading them! ;

I also thought this would be a good time to discuss how to make sure your paper is cohesive from start to finish. ;

Papers have two levels of unity: External and Internal

External unity is when all your paragraphs relate back to your thesis statement. ; This basically demonstrates that you have stayed on topic throughout your entire paper. ; Every paragraph should relate back to your overall argument….Example Thesis: ;Common Core Standards in primary education are a deterrent to student learning because they encourage rote memorization, discourage creativity and kinesthetic lessons, and because they reduce student achievement to scores on standardized tests

. ;

My body paragraphs would all then relate back to proving my statement. ; I would want each paragraph to demonstrate how common core standards do each of those things asserted. ;

Internal Unity is when all the sentences in a paragraph relate back to that paragraph’s own topic sentence. ;

A topic sentence is the first sentence in a paragraph which states what that paragraph will be about. ; I like to think of paragraphs as having the same basic structure as a paper as a whole.

They should look like this:

Topic Sentence

Supporting Sentences

Conclusion/Transition Sentence that rounds up that paragraph and leads to the next. ;

This is very similar to the overall structure of a paper:

Thesis statement/introduction

Supporting Body Paragraphs

Conclusion Paragraph

I even like to call the topic sentence the “baby thesis statement.”

To check for internal paragraph unity, read each paragraph on its own, isolated from the rest of the paper. ; Do each of the sentences in the paragraph relate to the main idea of that paragraph? ; If not, revise/remove. ;

Here is a link to an external website that has some topic sentence practice/description.