IGCSE CIE English

Paper 3 Tips Writing to Persuade

Writing a Newspaper Article

An article is a media text. This means that the writer is addressing a diverse and
unknown audience. This is why media language tends to be friendly yet also
rather more formal than, say, a personal conversation where you know the
audience well. Articles also use headlines as a way to catch the readers
attention and engage their mind.
This example is the beginning of an article about childrens education.

Childhood fun time or frantic time?

Did you know that in Denmark kids dont go to school until they
are 7? And research shows that they are among the happiest of
children in Europe. In the UK, we pack them off at 4, if not
sooner, and research shows our kids to be among the most
anxious in Europe. Children leave school in Denmark at the same
age as in the UK, so they have two years less education and
they have longer school holidays. So are British children
brighter and better prepared for life? Sadly, and confusingly, the
answer is a resounding, No! Danish children leave school with
significantly better literacy and numeracy skills than British
school children; and research shows that they enjoy their school
time far more than their British peers. Danish children are much
less likely to suffer mental illnesses or take illegal drugs and
Danish girls are much less often a single teen mum

Writing a Letter
A letter needs setting out correctly. This means adding in your address and the
date (and if it is a business or formal letter, your recipients address, too). In a
formal letter, the recipient wont know you at all and thus you need to be formal
and use Standard English throughout.
This example is the beginning of a letter sent to the editor of a newspaper
intended to appear on the newspapers Readers Letters page. It is in reply to
an article that appeared in the newspaper in which the writer expressed negative
views on education in British schools.
Dear Sir or Madam
As a sixteen-year-old who is a keen member of the
Loughborough High School sixth form committee, I read your
article on school life with some disbelief because the
experiences you described certainly do not mirror my own. I also
took the chance to carry out a short piece of research among
my peers, and I can report that they also feel strongly that your
writer has it wrong.

The writer states that Children in British schools are uniformly

unhappy and stressed but, speaking for myself, and backed up
by my research, I simply cannot agree

SOME PERSUASIVE TIPS & TRICKS!

Make your purpose clear, I am writing because the article you printed in last
weeks Echo both fascinated and disappointed me.

Sound utterly sincere and authoritative. You need to imagine yourself into the
role of the person in the exam question immerse yourself into their life and
feelings! This will help you to appear sincere and knowledgeable about your topic
or proposition. You will need to make up a bit of autobiography about yourself that
is convincingly realistic and impressive, e.g. Ive spent the last few years working
for a local charity and so far we have raised 12,500 towards this good cause. As
well as this I am part of a local team of Girl Guides who has helped many other
local charities .

Forge common ground. This means pointing out an outcome that your reader
will agree with, thus creating a sense of general agreement before you explain
where you differ, e.g. Im sure that both of us want the very best for our children,
for them to be happy and successful in life, for them to be able to

Use an anecdote (i.e. a brief account or story from life but made up for the
exam purposes). This needs to be told in a way that will create an emotional
response in your favour, e.g. Can I tell you about my friend, Annas experience?
She, like me, went to a local school, but her parents moved

Use carefully chosen rhetorical devices, i.e. ways of making what you say more
convincing and persuasive. These can easily make you seem aggressive however,
which will lose the argument immediately, so they always need handling with
care. At their best, they work to communicate how strongly you feel about an
issue in ways that will help bring your reader to feel this, too. Here are some of
the most useful ones:
Repetition: a repeated word or phrase makes a point stronger by implying
that you care and mean it, e.g. It is surely wrong to smack children very
wrong.
List of three: like repetition, this helps emphasise how you strongly feel
about something, e.g. There are ways of helping people that will work
some of the time; there are ways of helping people that will work all of the
time; and there are ways that wont work ever.
Parallel structure: this is a use of grammar, repeating the basic structure
of, not just a word or phrase, but a whole sentence. It is an impressively
sophisticated way to strengthen a point. The list of three above is an
example of a parallel structure and here is another: I dont expect you will
have heard this view before; indeed, I dont expect you will have heard
anything like this before, but.
Rhetorical question: this question helps you to make your point in a
very engaging way by seeming like a question but actually having the
force of a statement. Take care with these as they can be too forceful when

directed at the reader personally (i.e. as you as in, How would you like it
if you..?). A way around this risk of sounding too aggressive is to address
the question more widely, e.g. After all, how many people would want to
wake up in the morning to find themselves homeless?
Hyperbole is a use of exaggeration for effect. For example, It is life
destroying to be forced to do three hours homework each night and
How crazy is it to allow our young people to throw their lives away like
this?