Step by Step Checklist: Crafting the Persuasive LetterChoose your topic–your reader and their belief. Start by making a list of three, and live with them for a few hours, imagining the letter you’d write. The topic that produces the most developed letter–a thesis and the subjects of the body paragraphs would be ideal–is the one you want to go with.
Make a good faith effort to see matters from your reader’s eyes. Try to do so without judgment. What feelings, concepts, and rationalizations underlie your reader’s belief or behavior? Note them. Developing a clear, accurate understanding of your reader’s belief or behavior in your efforts to move them from it, and this exercise will help you to avoid a potentially fatal pitfall: Little is more lethal to the efforts of a persuasive writer than a mistaken assumption about what their reader thinks. Assess the rhetorical situation, and if necessary, research your subject. Our aim is to write a letter that balances its appeals. Because you know your reader, the emotional appeals you’ll make will likely come more easily to you. Be sure to consider your letter’s logical aspects, and assess to what extent your letter might profit from research. We research for two reasons. We research to strengthen our support. Also, we research simply to achieve the sort of command of our subject matter that is needed to write credibly about it. If you need to brush up on your subject, now is the time. Develop your thesis/main claim. The thesis is the central point of your letter, the point that unifies all the material within it. Succinctly and clearly, it needs to transact two tasks. 1. It needs to communicate what you want your reader to change. 2. It needs to communicate the major reasons why they should change it. (A smart strategy for structuring your argument is to make each “why” the subject of a body paragraph.) Outline your letter, This is a document for you. It can be as complex or as simple as you wish. Minimally, nail down the thesis/main claim and subjects for the body paragraphs. During outlining, listen to what your outline tells you about your project. The places in the outline that fill you with uneasiness are the places in your letter that are asking for your attention. Resolve as many issues as you can before starting the draft. The time needed to fix a problem during prewriting is usually far less than the time needed to fix the same problem during revision. Write your draft. Try to hear your words as you type. Imagine that you’re in a conversation but can freeze it in order to choose the words you like best. Your language should be mindful of the rhetorical situation and your ethos, or your credibility. Consider your relationship to the reader and to the subject matter, and pitch your language to be taken seriously. Put your draft away before you revise. Step 7 is: do nothing for a while–literally. Step 7 wins “Best Step.” To revise is to re-see, and after drafting, when we’ve spent so much time looking at a project, we experience a kind of eye fatigue that stops us from seeing it clearly. Avoid skipping this step. Put one sleep between the end of drafting and the start of revision. And whatever you do, do not submit your draft now. A certain perspective afflicts developing writers that sees the final period on the rough draft as the end of the process–few attitudes are more harmful to the grades that papers earn.
