PERSUASIVE WRITING

Lynn Quitman Troyka in Simon and Schuster Handbook for Writers, Prentice Hall International, London, 1990, featured this sample persuasive essay. The piece is focused on influencing the readers. It is also argumentative piece as it was aimed at convincing the audience. Notice that the objective of this writing was to change the mind of the reader with presented opinion which is backed by strong, sensible, and logical reasoning.

"The search for some biological basis for math ability or disability is fraught with logical and experimental difficulties. Since not all math under-achievers are women, and not all women are mathematics-avoidant, poor performance in math is likely to be due to some genetic or hormonal differences between sexes. Moreover, no amount of research so far has unearth a "mathematical competency" in some tangible, measurable substance in the body. Since "musculinity" cannot be injected into women to test whether or not it improves their mathematics, the theories that attribute such ability to genes or hormones must depend for their proof on circumstantial evidence. So long as about 7 percent of the Ph.D.'s in mathematics are earned by women, we have to conclude either that these women have genes, hormones, and brain organization different from those of the rest of us, or that certain positive experiences in their lives have largely undone the negative fact that they are female, or both" (Troyka 6).