A Guide To Academic Writing: Persuasive And Informative Essays
Over the course of your education, you’ll find yourself writing many, many papers for a wide variety of subjects and courses. Essay writing for school usually begins in late elementary or early middle school, and continues all the way through university education. There are two main types of academic paper that you will frequently have to write: persuasive essays and informative essays. These two types of writing are quite different, since they’re designed to work toward different goals. While an informative essay provides objective, unbiased information, persuasive papers argue for a specific opinion about an issue. You’ll use different techniques and writing styles, approaching these two distinct types of academic papers quite differently. Here are some tips for writing persuasive papers and informative papers.
Writing Great Informative Essays
Informative essays are exactly what they sound like. They present information about a topic. In an informational paper, you’re not arguing towards any specific opinion, point of view, or course of action. Instead, you’re simply presenting your audience with factual information.
- Informational papers should be backed up with evidence from reliable sources. After about middle school or so, you should no longer use encyclopedias as sources. They can be a great starting point to learn the basics about a topic that you’re unfamiliar with, but they’re considered “tertiary” sources. For most informational papers, you’ll instead rely on more credible “primary” and “secondary” sources. Primary sources include resources like historical documents and peer-reviewed scientific research papers. Secondary resources include books and other materials that draw on primary sources for their information.
- Informational papers should be as unbiased as possible. In an informational paper, you’re staying as neutral as possible toward your subject matter. You shouldn’t give any indication of a preference toward one theory or opinion over another. Never omit any facts that don’t support your views or fit your preferred narrative. All available information needs to be presented objectively, without bias. In an informational paper, it’s up to your readers, not you, to draw their own conclusions.
Writing Persuasive Essays
Unlike an informative academic paper, a persuasive paper is designed to try to convince your audience of a particular point of view. You’ll decide on your own opinion about a controversial issue, and then support your ideas with logic and reasoning. Ideally, you should be able to convince readers of the merit of your viewpoint.
- Back up your opinions with evidence that supports them. You can’t merely state an opinion without justifying why you think that opinion is correct. This means using facts to support a logical, clear line of reasoning leading to the opinion that you’ve settled on.
- Address and, if possible, debunk opposing views. You also need to address opposing viewpoints, discussing the evidence favored by their proponents. You can then talk about how and why those ideas are actually mistaken or incomplete.
