Teaching Persuasive Writing with Frankenstories

Persuasion vs argumentation

There is a difference between argumentation & persuasion.

  • Argumentation is about building an argument through reasoning & evidence.
  • Persuasion is about packaging that argument within a rhetorical experience to influence an audience.

The two concepts naturally overlap, but persuasion is especially concerned with social context, including identity, relationships, power, and motivation.

In a sense, persuasion is “applied” argument.

We discuss argumentation in Teaching Argument Writing with Frankenstories: covering how different types of claims are organised into a hierarchy and connected through different types of reasoning.

In this lesson, we’ll cover:

  • the relationship between speaker, issue & audience
  • the role of character, emotion & logic, and
  • specific persuasive language patterns & text genres.

In persuasive topics in the Frankenstories prompt library, you’ll notice that we often provide “specific” and “general” versions of each persuasive prompt.

The difference is in scale & emphasis:

  • Specific situation prompts will produce more grounded, concrete, narratively-oriented responses.
  • General trend prompts will produce broader, more abstract, policy-oriented responses.
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