We’re just beginning our Persuasive Essay unit in Intermediate English, and I thought I’d identify some relevant sites. I’ll also be converting this list into a more student-accessible post on our Intermediate English class blog.

Other “The Best…” lists that we use during this unit include:

The Best Sites To Learn About Street Gangs

The Best Sites For ELL’s To Learn About The Dangers Of Smoking

The Best Sites To Learn About Advertising

The Best Online Interactive Exercises For Writing That Are Not Related To Literary Analysis

Here are my choices for The Best Online Resources For Helping Students Learn To Write Persuasive Essays:

Here’s a Fact and Opinion game.

Try another Fact and Opinion Game.

Here are lots of fact and opinion activities.

PBS’ Arthur has a simple Facts and Opinions game.

It’s A Fact! is an online activity from Scholastic.

Making Connections is another exercise from Scholastic.

Argument is an activity from the BBC. Other activities connected to it are:

Read

Watch

Quiz

The BBC has another activity called Argue, Persuade, and Advise. Revise is a connected exercise.

Earthlings, Unite! is an interactive sample persuasive essay.

The Joystick of Learning is another interactive sample essay.

Hungry Students Can’t Study is one more sample essay, though it’s not interactive.

Here’s an accessible tutorial on writing a persuasive essay from Great Source.

Students can quickly and easily create a “map” of their persuasive essay here and post its url on a student or teacher website.

I like this persuasive essay outline generator a lot.

Persuasion Map is from Read Write Think, but it can only be printed-out, not saved.

ESL Bee has a number of sample persuasive essays written by ESL students.

“Seeing The Forest Through The Trees” is a post I wrote about teaching the Persuasive Essay that teachers might find useful.

Important Research For Writing Persuasive Essays

A study finds that both experts and non-experts can be more persuasive when they express uncertainty.

Writing for Justice • Persuasion from the Inside Out is an article by elementary school teacher Mark Hansen. It appears in Rethinking Schools.

He lays-out in detail a process he used to help his students write a persuasive essay. I’m not sure how many teachers would do everything he did, but he shares a lot of good ideas. Even though it describes them in the context of an elementary school classroom, I think several of his ideas could be adapted in other settings.

I will be using a simple “I Wish We Could Change” organizer organizer he created. When I teach my persuasive essay unit, it’s always a bit tricky to guide students towards a topic that holds their interest and would make the world a better place. This simple sheet would help that along nicely, I think.

BONUS: Cut Through the “Stickiness” of Prior Beliefs is a somewhat interesting article that contains an terrific chart/infographic reflecting some recent research.

“The 5 Most Persuasive Words in the English Language”

As always, feedback is welcome.

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