Reflection

Some of the reasons why writing a persuasive piece is so difficult is because even though you may think you know your topic well, chances are you only have a limited understanding of your topic. Those that think they fully know everything there is to know about their topic usually end up writing there persuasive piece through their own opinion thus creating a fallacious persuasive piece. Also if you don't fully support your argument then it would be a lot harder to write a persuasive piece. You may also find only a limited amount of facts for your argument, thus creating a not so persuasive piece. Usually when a writer is unable to support their argument with any more facts they tend to compensate for a limited amount of facts with their own opinion, and they believe that is alright. Supporting an argument with your own opinion is complete crap, if you don't have proof, evidence, statistics, etc to back up your opinion then your argument will not be very persuasive no matter how persuasive you think you're being.

The ways in which this can be improved is quite simple actually. If you just simply take the time to fully understand the depths of your argument and you fully understand every aspect of it then you will be set. Also instead of bull-crapping your way through everything by using your own opinion in place of raw facts you should take the time to research your argument and acquire logical facts that will strengthen your argument. Even though you shouldn't use your own opinion in place of fact that doesn't mean you can't use your own opinion to support your facts and not the other way around. Not only should you fully understand your side of the argument, but you should fully understand the opposing argument because that will give you a better understanding of the topic as a whole. This will also help you in writing your persuasive piece. Another reason why your persuasive piece may not be good is not because you don't have a good understanding of your topic, or you don't have enough facts, or too many logical fallacies, but maybe you just don't know how to properly structure your persuasive piece. Therefore reading more persuasive pieces or even researching how to properly structure your piece will definitely make your persuasive piece a lot better.

Not much would be needed to realistically improve these skills, because it's not that we are idiots and can't do the work, it's just that we are not fully applying ourselves, and only once we see a big fat 50 on our mid term when we will smarten up. If we just take the time to read over all this essay, editorial and persuasive stuff we will be good to go. If we truly take the time to read all the million and one comments you make on your writing pieces and learn from our mistakes then most of us will be fine.