Opinion Editorial

Hello again and welcome to Section 5 entitled common college writing assignments.

This is a section that I think many of you will find very useful.

It’s one I’m also especially excited about where I will I’m going to walk you through some key strategies

and ideas of how to write some of the most common college writing assignments effectively.

So today we’ll begin with the opinion editorial or the op ed.

First as always let’s go ahead and talk about the purpose.

The purpose of an op ed or an opinion editorial is to persuade your audience to agree with your claims

and then to act on a specific issue.

So today I’m going to walk you through.

First some pre-writing ideas and then each part of the actual paper and give some strategies.

Talk a little bit about each part of the opinion editorial the op ed paper so the introduction the body

and the conclusion.

But first the first thing we need to do is to choose a topic.

We do this obviously in our pre-writing stage of the writing process.

So in pre-writing we need to think first of what topics are relevant in your current life.

It’s very important to remain current and I’ll talk about this or remind you of this again at the end

but it’s also a useful idea to choose current topics that can also be read as controversial so controversial

topics make very good.

Op ed pieces because your readers will have an immediate response.

Once you’ve identified topics that you think are relevant in current in your personal current life start

to connect your personal interests and do some background just basic background research to make sure

you’re both informed and passionate about the topic.

So being informed is not enough and being only passionate is not enough.

We need to make sure we’re both informed and passionate about the topic we’re riding on.

The second thing we need to do in our pre-writing is to identify the audience.

So who is your specific audience.

What are the general opinions beliefs and values of your audience.

How might your audience take a stance on the issue.

And how come and what new information or ideas are you going to offer to those members who already agree

with you.

So in other words in order to carve out your own angle and to be able to present your opinion in a persuasive

way you need to identify your audience early on at least the audience your target audience in order

to decide which types of examples which type of rhetoric which level of diction and so on to use in

order to be most persuasive.

Once we’ve done our pre-writing we’ve answered these questions for ourselves and we’ve written down

a few ideas or we’ve done and we’ve drawn a mind map the search start to draw those connections that

we’ll discuss in detail in our paper.

We then need to come up with our thesis as we develop our thesis is important to first remember that

a really a really good opinion editorial is not simply an emotional wrap.

You see these all over the Internet these days of simple emotional rants about controversial topics.

That is not an effective opinion.

The Tauriel and effective opinion editorial strikes a balance between emotion logic and the effect of

appealing to authority.

So as you’re selecting a topic to write on makes sure that it is a topic that you’ll be able to apply

a balance to they are not only overly emotional about or that you’re not simply thinking logically about

something that you can tap into.

Each of these three elements of rhetoric.

Remember also that just like any other piece of writing it’s important is to select a narrow topic and

a topic where you’re going to be able to assert a certain claim as you develop your thesis.

Also remember that you want to write a thesis that people will disagree with.

Of course you want to persuade people to agree with you but your thesis should invite counter arguments

should invite disagreement.

Remember this is your opinion not a fact.

So you want people to agree and disagree so as you think about this you should think of the possible

objections to your thesis.

If you can think of a number of good counter-arguments that means you’re on the right track.

That means you have a good thesis.

So questions to ask yourself as well as you’re developing your thesis are things like.

Does the issue have at least two sides and is my stance on the issue clear.

Once you’ve constructed your thesis and again as always I’m happy to take a look at your thesis for

you before you even begin to write your paper.

But once you finish your thesis and you’ve done your introduction we move onto the body for the body

of an opinion editorial remember opinion editorials are typically quite short quite brief to the point

you should identify three or four main reasons why your audience should agree with your thesis.

You should state each of these reasons as the topic sentence of each of your body paragraphs so each

paragraph should discuss only one of those three or four reasons remember that each paragraph needs

to you have evidence that supports your original thesis and with an opinion editorials.

It’s also important to remember that you can and even should use both formal and informal research.

So life anecdotes peer surveys as well as research into more reputable sources.

So once we’ve created our body through three or four main paragraphs each discussing only one main reason

that our audience should agree with our thesis so we move on to our conclusion what do we conclude and

opinion though Tauriel it’s very important that we conclude again of course you don’t always have to

do it this way but it’s quite effective to conclude again with your own commentary on the topic.

You do it by doing things like providing a personal anecdote to illustrate your personal investment

in the topic.

So concluding on a personal anecdote that connects with the audience and shows your own investment and

about speaking frankly about the larger politics interpretations concerns and so on that have to do

with the more narrow topic there at hand.

And if you’re looking for examples of good opinion editorials the perfect place to look is simply that

your favorite newspaper or your favorite newspaper columnist.

Take a look at how he or she introduces the topic.

What topics are choosing how they develop their body paragraphs.

And of course how they conclude.

And to conclude today let’s give you some final tips.

Remember your topic should be current and controversial.

Those make for the best op ed writing topics.

Remember to be concise.

Again these are short so to the point state your claim very early on and clearly which is of course

my next point.

Stay where you stand clearly and early in your paper encourage the action that your opinion should invoke.

This is also a great thing to do and your conclusion is to encourage some sort of action.

Invite your audience to take action and that’s it.

So my opinion opinion editorials are some of the most fun writing you’ll be able to do on college.

But we also receive a lot of training on how to write an effective opinion Tauriel.

So I hope today helps in that regard.

If you do have any questions of course let me know.

I look forward to our next lecture on literary or textual analysis.