Page 1 of In-Class Persuasive Essay
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Page 2 of In-Class Persuasive Essay
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In-Class Essay Topics
Context:
It was a very cold winter day, and the class was fairly
empty. It was a miserable day commuting to York, so you couldn’t really blame
the attendance level. Nevertheless, Professor Beddoe made us all smile by assuring
us that it would be worth it. We were required to use our skills of persuasion
to write a quick essay on any of the topics listed on the slide above. We had a
very limited time of around 10-15 minutes, and since this would be a part of
this communication portfolio compilation, a lot of people would be missing it. After
the time was up we had to pass it on to another member of our row to read and
make comments based on if were with or against the argument (decided by our
birth month, i.e. July-December had to be against).
Reflection
_______________
The topic I chose was “Can Money Buy you Happiness?”. This
activity helped to hone my on-the-fly writing skills by having to not only
write a quick essay, but also make sure it didn’t have any grammatical and
spelling mistakes, all within 10-15 minutes. This was difficult as we are used
to having days and days at a time to work on essays so what I knew was that it
did not have to be extremely comprehensive, and outside research or proof was
not a concern. I made sure to have opening and closing statements and a
thorough enough body to convince my reader. I tried to use ethos to connect
emotionally to the reader. The art of rhetoric is not one that is easy to master.
From the professor’s feedback, I can deduce that it
was well-written and structured. I am left wondering if I was repetitive in any
of my points, and if so, would that be effective in terms of persuasion. Redundancy
can sometimes help to ingrain an idea into one subconsciously. Persuasive
writing is a great skill to have, especially as an Engineer in the future when
we will have to convince companies to consider my company’s proposal over
another’s for a particular project.
