Fightin' Words: Using Picture Books to Teach Argumentative Writing

So what's the difference between persuasive writing and argumentative writing? 

In persuasive writing, students passionately defend their point of view, relying upon opinion, personal experience, anecdotes, data, and examples. Argumentative writing, however, seeks to offer a more balanced approach, as it acknowledges points from the opposing view.

This approach may sound counterproductive; after all, won't writers weaken their arguments by providing the reader with counterclaims? Surprisingly, no. By naming objections and then refuting them effectively, writers actually strengthen the position of their arguments. Persuasion, on the other hand, is weak by comparison: it ignores, in a cowardly way, any viewpoint that is contrary and threatening to its own. It's blatantly one-sided and subjective.

So where can our young readers witness the power of argumentative writing? In picture books, of course!

In George Bellows: Painter with a Punch, author Robert Burleigh chronicles the career of a fascinating  and prolific artist who is celebrated for his gruff and gritty observations of the vitality and vigor of early twentieth century New York City. Burleigh provides the reader with "just enough" details of Bellows the man to make him real and rounded, and "just enough" context of the art scene of the time to build color and context. The majority of the text rightfully focuses on the images (profusely provided in beautiful color) and on Bellows' artistic legacy. 

As a teacher of reading and writing, I am struck by Burleigh's use of argumentative text structures which can serve as wonderful exemplars for young writers. Consider this passage from early in the text:

One man - seated at ringside - observes the events somewhat differently. He watches closely both the fury of the fighters and the fans' reactions. But who wins the bout doesn't matter to him. He has his own goal: to wrestle a picture from the chaotic scene, to capture the wild energy of this moment!

Is this strange? An artist here, in a smelly, grungy saloon?

Shouldn't an artist be searching for beautiful things to paint? Golden sunsets? Quiet, tree-lined rivers? Or perhaps a wealthy gentleman, or a celebrity dressed in her finest clothes? Many people would say just that.

But not George Bellows.

In that example, a series of questions defines the opposing viewpoint. We know that George will need a pretty darn good reason for choosing subjects so contrary to those of traditional artists!

In another selection, the opposing argument is presented more traditionally as a juxtaposition of one perspective to another:

George's paintings gain attention. He is among a group of artists who focus on the less romantic parts of the city, like bars, train stations, movie theaters, and alleyways...Reviewers attack the group, calling them "apostles of ugliness" because they dare to paint the seamier side of life...But a few reviewers find complimentary things to say about George's art. They especially praise his ability to convey strong feelings in his work.

One critic, although won over by Bellow's radical approach, still qualifies his admiration for the artist in a compliment that acknowledges the two opposing viewpoints of the time:

"It's in bad taste," one says, "but it's life - and that is the main thing."

As you can see, the examples of argumentation are there. They're subtly written, however, so as not to crowd out the narrative. That is exactly what makes them effective, and so worthy of our students' admiration and study and replication. 

In the excerpt below, note that the first two sentences juxtapose opposing viewpoints, with the word yet being the giveaway. The second pair of sentences follows the classic "some people say ______, but _______" format, with though serving in place of but:

"I don't know anything about boxing," he likes to say. Yet the paintings he makes based on these fights will become his best known works. Some critics note that the figures in the paintings are awkwardly drawn or that the ringside spectators have odd, caricatured faces. What concerns George most, though, is creating a "you-are-there" feeling.

Can students incorporate this same argumentative style into their writing? Absolutely. The key, in my opinion, is starting with some great exemplars. The next step is getting students to see that argumentative writing often relies upon a fairly standard set of sentence structures. This "sentence grammar" is more common in writing than you think!

Consider these templates:

• At first you might think _____, but _____.
• While it's true that _____, you need to remember that _____.
• It's possible that _______, but __________.
• Some people believe that _____; however, _____.

Here are those same templates, reworked with spelling words:

• At first you might think that vivacious children are wonderful, but after three hours you would find them to be very exhausting.
• While it's true that vitamins are part of a healthy diet, you need to remember that they can't take the place of nutritious foods.
• It's possible that coffee increases vitality, but it's still no substitute for a good night's rest.
• Some people believe that bees are attracted to sugar; however, bees are equally attracted to vivid colors.

Somewhat better than what students typically produce, right? But with the models, it's possible.

And again, those same templates as part of an expository paragraph about common misconceptions of the Holocaust, based upon a reading of An Introduction to the Holocaust for the Young Reader:

At first you might think that World War II caused the Holocaust since the two events are mentioned together so often; after some study, however, you would find that persecution of Jews in Germany began six years earlier. And while it's true that six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, you need to remember five million others who were considered undesirable were killed as well. It's possible to believe now that people should have stepped in to save the Jews, but you'd be surprised how few countries seemed to care at the time. You might think the United States was the exception, that we cared enough to step in; however, of the thirty-two countries that attended the Evian Conference, only one chose to accept Jewish refugees, and it wasn't the United States.

A perfect paragraph? No. But one that shows a balanced consideration of ideas; one that acknowledges common misconceptions, and then dispels them, one at a time.

Extensions:

• Share George Bellows: Painter with a Punch with students, reading through from beginning to end for the sheer enjoyment of the narrative and images. Show students additional Bellows' paintings in over-sized library books or online. I prefer using images online, as I can often resize them on-screen to match their approximate real-life sizes.
• Reread selections from the text in order to discuss the use of opposing viewpoints. Why does the author include them here? In what way is this text argumentative? How does mentioning the opposite viewpoint strengthen each point that author Robert Burleigh makes? 
• Once students have discussed some text selections, work with them to identify the "skeleton" or "template" of each argumentative structure. Then, supply students with new content to be rephrased in argumentative format using the author's exemplars. One example from above reads, "Some critics note that the figures in the paintings are awkwardly drawn or that the ringside spectators have odd, caricatured faces. What concerns George most, though, is creating a "you-are-there" feeling."  This excerpt relies upon the "Some people..." format, with the counter-punch statement using "though" to express opposition (however could have been used as effectively as though).
• Discuss the book's title with students. Some students will notice that the subtitle is alliterative, in that words share the same beginning sounds. If your students have recently read biographies, challenge them to write fictitious subtitles that rely upon either alliteration, rhyme, or word play. (Other students will notice that the top rope of the ring serves to underline the book's main title).
• Show students other nonfiction books which utilize a title and subtitle, and discuss this feature's purpose. Authors and editors may do write titles in this manner for many different reasons: to separate their book from others on the same topic, to add a creative twist while still keeping the main topic "out in front," or to provide prospective readers with the book's focus (for example, Abraham Lincoln: A Pioneer Boyhood is aimed at a different audience than Abraham Lincoln: Making of a President). 
• Require that students use sentence stems (aka templates, models, patterns) such as those above to contrast simple ideas. Start with simple single sentences, move to paired sentences, and finally to paragraphs. My own students have used them for lesson summaries, spelling sentences, responses to current events, summary paragraphs (such as the Holocaust piece above), and comparison/contrast writings about character motives.
• Check out this fantastic break-down of argumentative writing from Smekens Education Solutions, Inc. In addition to some teaching tips, you'll find a ready-to-go activity that challenges students to identify what makes a revised piece of writing argumentative. They've also produced a clever student friendly/teacher friendly interpretation of the ELA Writing Standard (6.1) for Text Types and Purposes.

Recommended Reading

If you're looking for a single, go-to title for working with argumentative text models like those above, check out They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. This book explains in clear words, dozens of templates, and numerous real-world examples the powerful concepts which guide argumentative writing.

Here you'll find templates for openings, closings, discussion, disagreement, etc. You'll also have at your fingertips many professionally written articles, essays, and speeches which show these same templates at work (check out the explanation of argumentative writing in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail shown in the book preview on Amazon). 

This work, aimed at both instructors and high school- and college-aged students, is must reading.

Valentines for Vermin: Love Poems for the Unloved

Looking for a fun writing activity that integrates well with Valentine's Day? Then look no further than Vulture Verses: Love Poems for the Unloved.

This book is a funny and fact-filled collection of "friendship notes" written to some of the most unlovable creatures one could imagine. Through her poems and accompanying facts, author Diane Lang helps us see that even bats, turkey vultures, spiders, skunks, and mosquitoes (to name but a few of the animal dignitaries) deserve some love.

The friendship note to the fly, for example, reads:

Oh fly, though no one seeks to ask,
Recycling is your secret task.
You eat the things that die or spoil
And make them part of growing soil.
So, though I shoo you from my plate, 
You're someone I appreciate!

Below that we read:

Flies are specialists at eating things that are dead and decaying, getting them ready to become part of new, healthy soil.

Lovely paintings by Lauren Gallegos illustrate each animal at its most industrious, making even the most scream-worthy of the lot seem noble, or, at the very least, tolerable.

Extensions:

• The book closes with a request: "So many cards to write! So many animal friends! I may need some help. Do you know someone who is misunderstood? Will you help me write friendship notes, too?" Such a fantastic suggestion! Working in pairs or teams, students can research basic facts about other unloved animals that "scuttle, slither, buzz, and sting." Why are these creature seen as so horrible? What makes them worthy of our admiration? See if your students can write similar poems to change the loathsome to the lovable. Picture books such as Melissa Stewart's marvelous Animal Grossapedia will provide ample information and inspiration for even the most reluctant writers.
• As an additional challenge, ask students to write the above poems in the first person, as if they are the animal. They must defend themselves to humans, and justify the "bad rap" which they've been given. Students could be further challenged to write these poems without naming themselves (the animal could be identified at poem's end or in the title alone). Students can then read the poems aloud, and classmates can guess the identity of the nefarious narrator.
• What role do these animals play in other stories, whether fables, myths, or folktales? With what traits have they been branded? Have students create original fables using one of the creatures from Vulture Verses: Love Poems for the Unloved, or from their research project above. See my earlier post Animal Attractions for more ideas and suggested titles for fables.
  
• Diane Lang uses fantastic vocabulary in both her poems and follow-up facts. Discuss some of these words and challenge students to define them, using context clues alone. Why did the author choose these and not their simpler synonyms? If students completed any of the above activities, ask them to revisit their writing to substitute words that are more exacting and creative for those which are overused or ordinary.

Do you have a favorite reading or writing activity to celebrate Valentine's Day? If so, please leave a comment below!

And if you haven't entered yet, be sure to get in on the raffle for one of three animal picture books happening on this blog (scroll to the bottom of that page).

As Seen on TV! Media Messages Unmasked

Our students represent a lucrative target audience. Companies bombard them daily with ads through every possible venue, so much so that most advertising is now an integral, barely noticed part of the American landscape.

And there's the rub. Barely noticed, yet there, exerting a powerful influence on how children choose to buy, think, and act.

In previous posts I've discussed persuasive writing (Convince Me: Real-Life Uses for Persuasive Writing and So What’s Your Point? Persuasive Writing Using Picture Books) as well as financial literacy (Dollars and Sense for Students). Now Scholastic has teamed up with the Federal Trade Commission to combine these two ideas, plus the concept of media literacy, to produce the Admongo site and its related teacher resources.

The FTC site explains that

Advertising is a multi-million dollar business. Truthful advertising provides benefits to consumers and competition. It gives consumers the information they need to make better-informed purchasing and product use decisions. It also gives companies an incentive to modify their products to provide features that customers want. By contrast, false advertising interferes with decision-making and hinders competition.

Tweens have their own money to spend, and parents report that children play an important role in family buying decisions. Because kids are an important part of the marketplace, they often are the targets of advertising and marketing programs. The result is that American kids see ads wherever they go.

The four components of the campaign (a game-based website at Admongo.gov, sample ads that can be used in the classroom; a free curriculum, and teacher training videos) are designed to help students learn to ask three key "critical thinking" questions when they encounter advertising:

• Who is responsible for the ad?
• What is the ad actually saying?
• What does the ad want me to do?

While I personally used authentic ads that children know (and strangely love), I appreciate that this program offers fictitious yet genuine-looking ads and videos for classroom discussion. The advantage to the fake ads is that children can't assume they know the product and its merits; students definitely paid closer attention to the details.

So why study advertising? There is perhaps no better real-world use of critical thinking and reading skills than the accurate interpretation of mainstream media. Because so many of our daily thoughts and actions are based upon what we're told to believe, it's imperative that we become more educated and discerning in our media consumption. Media literacy allows students to put discrete reading and writing skills to work as they learn advertising's tricks of the trade.

Additional Recommended Sites

While the Scholastic resources and the Admongo site are impressive and complete in themselves, I also recommend the following resources:

• Co-Co's AdverSmarts: An Interactive Unit on Food Marketing on the Web is "an interactive unit designed to help kids between the ages of 5 and 8 recognize the marketing techniques used on commercial web sites that target children." I'd use this site for the younger set (up to fourth grade).
• Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is an intelligent and innovative program aimed at helping girls understand that self-image isn't dependent upon media messages. While you're at that site, be sure to check out the teacher resources.
• The Ad Council has provided access to many of the campaigns from its 60 years of existence. The quality and impact of their PSAs (Public Service Announcements) is legendary, and students should see that ad techniques can actually be used for good rather than evil. Need an example? Check out this video on Reducing Gun Crime (also embedded below).

Viral

Reducing Gun Violence-Babies | Viral/Other | SPIKE.com

Recommended Books

One terrific companion book for the classroom is Made You Look: How Advertising Works and Why You Should Know by Shari Graydon (Annick Press). For older students, this book is a terrific expose of how persuasive writing is used to influence consumers. It's also a pretty cool "idea book" for putting persuasive writing skills to work.

For younger students, Do I Need It? Or Do I Want It? by Jennifer S. Larson (Lerner) is an attractive yet informative choice, allowing opportunities for lots of discussion about what we choose to buy and why. (Be sure to check out other titles in Lerner's Exploring Economics series).

Pretty in Print: Questioning Magazines by Stergios Botzakis, TV Takeover: Questioning TV by Guofang Wan, and Virtually True: Questioning Online Media by Guofang Wan are part of the Media Literacy series published by Capstone Press. All of the titles are organized around five basic questions:

• Who made the message and why?
• Who is the message for?
• How might others view the message differently?
• What is left out of the media?
• How does the message get and keep my attention?

An easy to read style, plenty of photos and illustrations, and try-it-out activities help students see that advertising isn't entirely about "going over to the dark side." Students instead realize that persuasive media offers many opportunities for creative people who are up to the challenge of getting messages across to audiences in the most effective ways possible.

So What's Your Point? Persuasive Writing Using Picture Books

While some of our students may go on to become best-selling authors, all of them as adults will speak and write to convince others: to buy, to act, to vote, to choose, to agree. That's why it is so important that we as teachers help our students to develop effective persuasive writing skills.

A fantastic new picture book will help students see that persuasion need not be a totally serious matter. In Lincoln Tells a Joke, authors Kathleen Krull and Paul Brewer and illustrator Stacy Innerst help students discover the funny side of Abraham Lincoln. (You can read some rave reviews for yourself at the Houghton Mifflin site).

Although we now hold him in the highest regard, Lincoln for his time was a surprisingly unpopular president. Yet he used humor to make points, to win people over, to lighten the mood, to gently turn away requests he could not grant, and to relieve the stresses of a difficult office (made all the more difficult by the Civil War). This unique biography is full of Lincoln's more clever sayings, which hold up surprisingly well after more than one hundred years.

My students appreciated that his quotes were printed in a stylized, flowery font which made them easier to spot. What's more awesome about this book is Stacy Innerst's caricatures. When I asked students why the publisher hadn't chosen an artist with "a more serious, realistic style," they patiently explained to me that the exaggerated pictures added additional humor to the book. And they do!

I prefaced my reading aloud of the book with a short oral quiz on facts about Lincoln:

• What number president was Lincoln? (Almost everyone knew that he was the sixteenth).
• Who was Number 15? (No one knew). Why don't any of us know this? How can we find this out?
• What war began shortly after Lincoln took office? (We discussed the Civil War a bit; students were surprised to discover that there were, and are, other civil wars in the world).
• What might have made Lincoln unpopular? (Students were surprised that even some Northerners didn't care for him; as a part of that discussion, I mentioned that the Civil War required a draft, and wealthier citizens could buy their way out of it, while poorer citizens could not).
• If Lincoln was still president at the end of the war, what did this mean? (It meant that, regardless of his lack of popularity, he was still popular enough to be reelected. Not coincidentally, the Civil War was the first time that soldiers in the field were able to cast ballots).
• What happened to Lincoln shortly after the war?

Once the book was over, students had plenty they wanted to discuss; I didn't need any post-reading questions. But one topic I did pursue was, "Why might a speaker use humor in a persuasive speech?" This prompted many excellent reasons, from both the book and students' own experiences.

So what's the connection to persuasive writing?

Online you can find dozens of templates for organizing persuasive essays, but I prefer this one-page organizer from Scholastic which I've used in the past with The True Story of the Three Little Pigs).

A best bet, however, is the Persuasion Map from ReadWriteThink (you can also click on the Persuasion Map homepage, which provides several related lessons). This interactive tool walks students through the process of organizing thoughts, and presents them with a mapped outline of the thesis, reasons, and details which can, in turn, be used to generate a formal essay. Students could use those same ideas, however, to create a commercial, advertisement, article, or letter.

After demonstrating the Persuasion Map Tool to my sixth graders, I provided the following prompt for extra credit (and it created quite a stir!):

In an effort to reduce bullying and violence at school, one school has offered “Citizenship Credits” to students who provide information about classmates who break rules, display inappropriate behavior, or use inappropriate language. These Citizenship Credits can be collected and redeemed for grade point increases; in other words, if a student collects enough credits, she can have a grade raised by one or two points on her report card. What is your opinion on this policy? Write a letter to the principal stating your position and offering reasons why our school should, or should not, adopt this policy.

If you're looking for a more substantial resource for the upper grades, The Language of Advertising Claims breaks down ten techniques which advertisers employ to persuade potential customers. Author Jeffrey Schrank introduces these techniques, saying

Students, and many teachers, are notorious believers in their immunity to advertising. These naive inhabitants of consumerland believe that advertising is childish, dumb, a bunch of lies, and influences only the vast hordes of the less sophisticated. Their own purchases are made purely on the basis of value and desire, with advertising playing only a minor supporting role...

Advertisers know better. Although few people admit to being greatly influenced by ads, surveys and sales figures show that a well-designed advertising campaign has dramatic effects. A logical conclusion is that advertising works below the level of conscious awareness and it works even on those who claim immunity to its message. Ads are designed to have an effect while being laughed at, belittled, and all but ignored.

The ten techniques in The Language of Advertising Claims can be used to either dissect ads which students collect from magazines and the internet, or to create ads for fictitious products.

From LEARN NC, a nicely done learning module on Arts of Persuasion for middle school students features "Strategies for teaching middle school students to think critically, analyze persuasive arguments, and use speaking and writing to persuade others." Many ideas there can be adapted for younger students.

Teachers of middle grades and high school will also appreciate the very cool interactive writing models found at the Holt, Rinehart and Winston Model Bank.

In the center of each model is a formal essay; left hand margin notes detail each part of the essay and, when clicked upon, highlight the exact sentences in that section. Right hand margin notes tell the student what to include in each section, and why. A terrific resource for use on the interactive whiteboard, or as a handy reference when students are working individually.

If your students are having trouble differentiating between arguments, persuasion, and propaganda, the single page resource titled Argument, Persuasion, or Propaganda? from ReadWriteThink would be a great asset.

And finally, another way to study persuasive writing is to look at the copy writing of classic ads. One of my favorites is the Charles Atlas ad which appeared in the comic books of my youth. I discussed that ad at my Teaching that Sticks site, and provided some insight (and references) into why it was so popular and effective. What other ads are now considered classics? What made them so effective? How did their creators use persuasive language to sell ideas and products?

Have a favorite site, tool, or prompt for persuasive writing? Leave a comment below or drop me line!