Writing Arena

Persuasive writing ks2 can be tricky as students are asked almost for the first time to shape and style their writing in a certain way. However, there are some persuasive writing ks2 tasks that children can do to improve their understanding of the process.

Before we detail our own section of advice and guidance, here are the persuasive writing ks2 resources that are recommended by Writing Arena:

Activities for Teaching Persuasive Writing for Ages 7-9
Activities for Teaching Persuasive Writing for Ages 9-11
Brilliant Activities for Persuasive Writing - Activities for 7-11 Year Olds
Learning Persuasive Writing and Argument: part of the Teach your Child Good English series: (KS 2-3 +) (ages 8-14 years) A Core Guide for All Students

Starting Out

The first step with persuasive writing ks2 is to make children understand exactly what persuasive writing is using information and examples that are easy to digest.

Start by asking the student or group you’re teaching if they understand the word ‘persuade’. Regardless of whether they do or not this is an excellent starting point to work from.

Once you’ve got the definition understood you can ask for examples of where people might try to persuade you.

Some good (and fun) examples to use are advertisements, perhaps for films or specific products. This is an opportunity to introduce some visual aids.

After hammering home the idea of persuasion, the link can then be made to persuasive writing.

Persuasive Writing KS2

Explaining that writing is another way to persuade people is the first step.

It’s then a good idea to use a sustained example so that students can almost subconsciously begin to understand persuasive writing. A good topic to choose is ‘Smoking’ as children from a young age know that smoking is bad and they shouldn’t do it.

If you can get hold of stop smoking material (like from here: http://gosmokefree.nhs.uk/) then you can show students how it is possible to use writing such as leaflets and posters to persuade people to stop smoking.

Ask them to read through the material and write down 4 or 5 reasons why people should not smoke and then discuss them to ensure they’re on the right track.

Setting the Task - Persuasive Letter Writing KS2

For the first persuasive writing ks2 task you set students, it should never be an essay. Building up their understanding of the codes and conventions of persuasive writing gradually is important for getting the best results.

An ideal first task for persuasive writing ks2 is to write a letter persuading the person to take your point of view on a subject. So, carrying on with the stop smoking theme you can set the following task:

Tom smokes but is thinking of giving up but can’t decide. Write him a letter persuading him to give up smoking and telling him why it is a good idea.

You can tell students to use the 4 or 5 examples you asked them to write down earlier and simply incorporate them into a letter. This is a nice plan for slowly building up their understanding of persuasive writing.

Building up Persuasive knowledge

After writing the persuasive letter to a good level and understanding the basic codes and conventions of persuasive writing, ks2 students should then be taught more in-depth stylistic essay writing techniques.

Moving from a letter to an essay shouldn’t be too difficult, providing students are made aware of the right way to go about writing a persuasive essay.

For example:

Structure: An introduction to explain why you’re writing. So in this case it would be to persuade someone to stop smoking.

Paragraphs offering evidence and explaining why each piece supports your point of view.

A conclusion summing up everything you’ve said.

Attract, Engage, Inform - These are three words that follow students around from ks2 to ks3 and even up to GCSE and A Level.

Students must:

Attract the readers attention. They can do this by starting with a hard hitting first sentence that readers can’t forget.

Engage - The writing style must be friendly and easy to read. Use overly descriptive language so instead of ‘good’ use ‘excellent’ or ’superb’ to emphasise points.

Inform - Explain the evidence and why it supports your point of view.

The Persuasion Checklist

A good handout to give is a checklist of all the things that should be in a persuasive writing ks2 text. This might look something like:

Have I used?

An opening statement of the case
Techniques to attract and engage
Evidence and examples
Persuasive language
Powerful reasons and benefits
A closing statement to reinforce

Persuasive Writing KS2

This is just one method for teaching persuasive writing ks2, whether it be to a group of students in school or to simply supplement what a child has learned in the classroom.

Here are some additional texts that will also help support persuasive writing ks2:

Activities for Teaching Persuasive Writing for Ages 7-9
Activities for Teaching Persuasive Writing for Ages 9-11
Brilliant Activities for Persuasive Writing - Activities for 7-11 Year Olds
Learning Persuasive Writing and Argument: part of the Teach your Child Good English series: (KS 2-3 +) (ages 8-14 years) A Core Guide for All Students

Flashwriting.

“I’m sitting in front of my screen, feeling the beat, the monotone drum of hands banging canvas as the dust kicks around me, shards of brown specks glittering as they fall back to the floor. I’m being sucked in by secret moves so succinct I think this toil is gonna explode with crazy Tribal dances as we yelp and howl around the fire.” (Flash in Time, 24/07/2004)

Flashwriting is where the fire can kindle. The heat washes over your body. You find out very soon whether you’re dry wood for the World Wide Write or if you have simply found a knack for sponged words and clever twists of the flannel.

I uncovered the world of flashwriting four years ago. A woman called Zoe, writer and editor for two magazines, asked on writing website, Writersdock, for fourteen people to participate in a writing experiment.

I was at a crossroads with my writing. I’d recently had a short story folded and transformed into x-rated origami, then cut into tiny pieces and thrown from the edge of a cliff. It was the blackest moment of my writing career and I honestly considered quitting. Maybe find a 9-5 office job and spend the rest of my life writing pompous letters to the editor of the Daily Mail about the degeneration of society, because some excitable girls were enjoying hopscotch outside of my driveway. My gut, however, wanted to try this ‘writing experiment’. What did I have to lose?

Zoe explained to me that she was unsure of what would be achieved in this experiment. Named ‘Flash in Time’, she was going to try and get us to embark on an exploration into our pasts, thoughts and writing process. Every Sunday, we’d enter this chatroom provided by the Writersdock team. The first session is still very vivid in my mind’s eye.

Slowly, the guinea pigs amassed at the feet of the mad scientist, exchanging nervous banter and polite conversation. I’m sure everyone, like myself, clock-watched as we considered what was about to happen. At 9.15pm, Zoe asked us if we were ready. With trepidation and tingling sensations, I said yes. She explained to us we would be given a visualisation, a walkthrough, hopefully triggering subconscious thoughts. After ten to fifteen minutes, the visualisation stopped with the prompt, ‘NOW WRITE.’ Here is a section of one of her visualisations, taken from session five:

“09:22:18pm Zoek> First of all, I want you to close your eyes for a moment
09:22:28pm Zoek> and breathe deeply…
09:22:39pm Zoek> things may feel a little strange at first,
09:22:44pm Zoek> but just relax,
09:22:56pm Zoek> try to focus, and go with the process.
09:23:06pm Zoek> We’re about to take a walk…
09:23:18pm Zoek> It’s a clear, balmy evening…
09:23:31pm Zoek> and the sun is just painting the finishing touches to the sky…
09:23:40pm Zoek> and to the red mackerel clouds.
09:23:46pm Zoek> As you watch…
09:23:53pm Zoek> you let your mind explore the clouds…
09:23:57pm Zoek> create countries,
09:24:03pm Zoek> paint pictures….
09:24:09pm Zoek> A soft rain begins,
09:24:12pm Zoek> but it’s warm.
09:24:22pm Zoek> it feels good on your skin.”

This particular visualisation was ten minutes. The whole process of this visualisation was to bring us into a pseudo-meditational frame of mind. We wrote non-stop for twenty minutes with no consideration for grammar or punctuation. Every session, I switched off my bedroom light and played some music, very quietly, with just the white screen in front and keyboard below. I imagine it is a similar buzz to a sprinter at their starting block, that quiet feeling of containment, attempting to resist the pressure of the moment from affecting the psyche. When the gun fires, the energy bursts through you as you try to type as fast as you think, not happy until you have exhausted every thought. Here is the beginning of my written piece for the fifth visualisation:

“And I’m here, I’m beneath the rainbow, this wondrous rainbow that shows so much, elaborates on the core of our life, on our semblance of life, our snippets into the past, into a life hidden, stuffed into the closet, hidden and told to leave. Leaving too much pain and too much hurt. It’s my aching bone. It’s my ugly neighbour of the soul, an unclean memory of what ifs, and how it could have been.

I wish it were gone, but it isn’t. It’s here, with the rainbow, a different representation in each colour. The complexities of colours, the different tastes, from sour to sweet, from bland to burnt.

If only she knew the hurt, the pain, the grief she caused. When I saw those pictures, when I saw her infidelity, when I saw exactly what she wanted me to feel. To feel the jealousy, to tear at the picture, to hold it in pieces and cry, and curl up on the bed and shake, a mirage of the happy self moments ago.

She knew she’d ripped me apart, she’d taken my melody; she held my blackbird voice and twisted the crow out. I was broken, shattered self’s of the mirror. And I lay there, and I cried, and shouted and wondered why? Why had this happened to me? Why was this the reality check?”

Now the piece itself has its moments of evocative writing and other aspects of broken ramblings full of adjectives. However, the beauty that came from this ‘writing experiment’ was the ability to escape the analytical intrusion of the brain. This experiment allowed me to find freedom in my style. The above piece was reworked. It found a home with an online e-zine. After nearly twenty-five Flash in Time sessions, I found my voice and have since had varying success with my writing. I was no longer a dog chasing its tail.

Do I say to everyone that they should try and organise a similar process amongst friends to try out? No. All I can say is that this worked for me and most of the other adventurers in the Flash in Time project. Samuel Beckett says ‘take a leap of faith into the dark.’ Why not? There might be a light somewhere.

I studied creative writing at university and like so many students of the subject, when my final year began to enter its less than exhilarating climax I began to ponder my career prospects. When I questioned various members of the illustrious faculty about what I should do upon completion of my course, I was given the same answer:

“Erm…write a book”

Thanks.

Despite my utter disbelief at their less than inspirational advice, it wasn’t a bad idea.

In theory, writing a novel shouldn’t be a particularly difficult proposition I thought. After all, I’m a relatively creative person and always have lots of ideas floating around in my head. If nothing else, my time at University had equipped me with the skills necessary to knock together a decent story. How difficult could it be?

A close friend of mine recommended reading a book by Steven King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft) where the man himself offers pearls of wisdom on writing a novel. It is certainly a worthwhile read to anyone starting out on the long and lonesome path. However, the one snippet of advice that particularly resonated with me was how he spoke about writing everyday and how he always makes himself complete 1000 words or so. I started to do the math:

A novel is somewhere between 60,000 to 100,000 words (well, the kind of novel I was going to write certainly wasn’t any longer).

1000 words a day so that’s 60 to 100 days to write a novel.

…well, that doesn’t sound too hard.

For some reason, I have this mechanism in my brain that always switches on when I’m faced with long tasks which allows me to break them down until I’m happy with what lies ahead. For this reason, once I’d done the math, I felt able to sit down and outline a rough plan of my novel…thanks Steve!

I started out like an express train churning out words everyday and before too long I’d reached the 30,000 mark and it hadn’t even taken me the month I’d forecast.

I’ve always sworn by the same writing theory, whether I’m writing an essay, a speech or a short story and that theory is simple:

Get it down on the page.

However boring your writing is, at least when it’s down on the page it is there and it’s tangible and you can work with it. Unfortunately though, with novel writing this leaves you with a mountain to climb even after you’ve finished your hundred thousand words. This is where I began to realise just how difficult writing a novel actually is.

So to rejoin my story, I’m at 30,000 words and I make the mistake of looking back over my writing and unfortunately, I didn’t like what I was reading. So I started editing and reworking and added words and taking out commas and thinking of new ideas and ways of doing things. Before too long I’d come up with so many ideas that none of it seemed to make sense within the context of the novel I was writing. Here I lost my motivation.

That 30,000 words is still sitting on hard-drive to date with no progress on the horizon.

My novel writing journey has stalled since the early days of post-graduate hope, optimism and logical mathematics. There are many reasons such as becoming employed, starting a new relationship and other time-consuming activities. However, the one overriding problem is that I have hundreds of ideas for a novel but just don’t seem to be able to decide what I want to write and what the best method is for turning a good concept into a great novel.

Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that I must merge my early novel writing theories with a more patient and caring approach.

I believe the best way of writing a novel is to commit to adding to it daily, but at a slower rate so I can take far greater care over what I’m putting down on the page. This allows more time for thought over advancing the narrative and building up the characters without sacrificing on quality or momentum.

Perhaps when I’ve written as many books as Steven King, I’ll be able to muster 1000 quality words a day.

…we’ll see.