Monday, December 3, 2012

Opinion Paper - also known as 5-Paragraph Essay

Writing this on the Literacy Test requires that you are able to fill in at least a page and a half of two blank pages

You will need to have a REALLY GOOD PLAN to write enough about any topic.

That means, you need to know a pattern that you can use for any topic.

We are going to learn a pattern called The Essay Skeleton

It is the bones of your essay and using it BEFORE WRITING will help you get enough material

Essay Skeleton

1. What am I saying? - Thesis - what is the point of the opinion paper? your opinion about something

That introduction is the place where you introduce your opinion.

It’s the same as a topic sentence.

So, every introduction paragraph should have THREE things:

a quick overview of the topic area - general
a thesis statement - specific
a quick overview of (and statement of) your THREE MAIN PROOFS for your opinion

If the thesis statement is that students should not be using cell phones in class, what would be a good topic area to begin the discussion?

distractions
technology
students focusing
challenging learning

the general topic area could be any one of those

Technology is a great benefit in our society, but there are negatives that people may not realize until they are facing them day after day. Some kinds of technology are particularly negative in their ability to distract young people. One of the most distracting technologies we see in our classrooms is the cell phone. When we think about what a cell phone can do, especially texting, gaming and giving access to social networking, we can see that there are way too many things to do with a cell phone and students find it difficult to resist.

Above, we see a) and b) - a) is the first two sentences and b) is the third.
We still need to add our quick overview of the proofs. This would be where we quickly state what each of our THREE next body paragraphs would be about.

In order to write those down, we need to have planned them out first.

For this opinion paragraph, what could we use as our body paragraph discussion points?

1. texting   

2. games on a smart phone

Facebook and Twitter

For each of the body paragraphs, you need to follow a certain paragraph structure.

It is called Point -> Proof -> Discussion
Or Your idea -> The Support -> The Explanation/Reasoning
Or PEE - Point -> Evidence -> Explanation

The hard part is the explanation - This is where you LINK your idea or opinion with the main thesis of your whole paper.

That link goes - texting -> hard to resist -> distracting -> this is bad - the logic is to prove these things and show examples.

Texting - distracting because the student is focusing on the messages - a student could be in a discussion where the subject was important to a test and the student misses some key information from the teacher as they read the message from a friend - LINK - when students aren’t paying attention in class, they are missing important material they may have to use - this impacts marks and can affect their credit.

The idea here is to EXPLAIN YOUR THINKING.