Editorial Assignment (A Guide)

For those students who (ahem) took the Holiday break 'off', here is a friendly guide to assist you in the completion of your assignment.

The purpose of any editorial is to either persuade or argue. Remember, a persuasive piece relies more on emotion, whereas, an argument relies on factual evidence.

To write your effective persuasive editorial you will need to do the following:

Prewriting:

1. Identify your audience. Ask yourself, ‘for whom am I writing this for?’

2. Next, you must consider your purpose. In this case, it would be to persuade an audience to agree with your personal views on the issue.

3. Finally, you must fully consider the subject matter or topic. Before writing, you need to familiarize yourself with the issue. Writing the editorial will be easy if you think about the subject first.

Writing:

To write the editorial you need to follow this simple format. Each part can be written as individual paragraphs, as long as you link them with transitions. You must achieve a certain sense of fluidity in your editorial, the only way that will occur is if you use transitional phrases, transitions, and conjunctions. Here’s the format:

1. Introduction: this section of your editorial will introduce the topic and/or issue. Here, you must give your audience some background information on the subject/issue/topic. Here’s an example:

“This holiday season, many U.S. businesses have decided to greet their customers with ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of the more traditional ‘Merry Christmas’ greeting.”

-or-

“In many U.S. public schools, administrators have chosen to place video cameras in hallways and classrooms.”

2. Reaction: this section of your editorial offers your audience your personal subjective perspective feelings/position on the issue/subject/topic. You may use first person pronouns (yeah!!!!!). Here’s an example:

“I feel that saying ‘Happy Holidays’ to customers during this holiday season takes away from the true meaning of Christmas.”

-or-

“I feel that saying ‘Happy Holidays’ to customers is okay and those who say it should not be looked down upon.”

-or-

“ I feel that placing video cameras in public schools is wrong.”

3. Details: this section explains and supports your position using both subjective perspective (opinions, feelings, and emotions) and objective perspective (factual data, evidence, information). You must support all subjective views with factual information.

You may use the following forms of evidence to support your position:

a. researched information
b. surveys
c. previous studies, articles, reports, etc.

There is no need for a works cited page because all information used for support should be cited within your work. Here’s an example:

“According to a recent USA Today survey, over 65% of Americans feel that saying ‘Happy Holidays’ to customers or friends goes against the meaning of Christmas.

-or-

“In a 1994 court case, the Anaheim School District was ordered to remove all video cameras from each of its 153 public schools.”

4. Conclusion: this section offers solutions to the issue/topic/or subject. This is where you provide your audience with your recommendations, on how to ‘fix’ the problem. The solutions need to be original, inventive, and achievable.

Because the recommendations are subjective, no one can truly challenge them. However, if the recommendations are ‘illogical’ then the likelihood of your views being challenged greatly increase.

Postwriting:

Once your editorial has been written, read it aloud. If sentences don’t make sense…rewrite them. The primary goal of an editorial is to convince, but if your writing is flawed, you may not achieve your goal.

Check your editorial for the four parts. Make sure that each part/section is tied together with transitions. the goal is to link a variety of ideas together and have one cohesive unit, not one editorial with four very noticeably individual parts.

Lastly, remember, this assignment reflects YOUR personal opinions. It is perhaps one the easiest assignment that you will ever write.