English 101

Writing Project #1: Narrative of a Persuasive Moment

For your first writing project, I want you to tell the story of a moment in your life (or an hour,
week, whatever) when you tried to achieve a goal with writing or speech—successfully or not—
in approximately 4 double-spaced pages. In other words, your narrative should tell a story
about your attempts to use language to get something you wanted. Since you don’t have a lot of
room, make sure you choose a story that you can narrate in detail in 3-4 pages. Besides telling a
good story, you should also try to explain to your audience the persuasive strategies you used to
convince the person you were trying to persuade. Consider your audience for the paper which is
not only your instructor, but all of the students in class.

You have two tasks, then, in this paper: first, tell a good story, and second, describe the
methods (emotional, logical, and ethical) you used and their effectiveness. I think you can
manage both at once although you might want to think about them separately as you work on
ideas and then draft the paper.

After you’ve decided what moment in your rhetorical history to narrate, you might think about
these questions as ways to generate ideas and organize your paper:
 Describe yourself and your position in the situation? What challenges did you face? What else
does your reader need to know about the situation? Who are the major characters? What is the
setting?
 What is the relationship between you (main character) and the person you are trying to
persuade in the situation?
 What kinds of persuasive strategies did you use? Authority? Credibility? Logic? Emotional
Appeals?
 How did you come up with, plan, and organize your argument? What tone did you adopt?
 How would you describe your delivery?
 Were you successful? Why or why not? What did you learn? What would you do next time
if you had another chance?
These are just suggestions, NOT an outline of what you must cover. Above all, narrate a lively
story and use it to illustrate your ability to persuade (or your inability to persuade!). Oh, and
make sure you give this paper a good title.