Because you’re walking a delicate line and trying to persuade your audience that your position is correct, you need to make sure you carefully include the following elements in your argumentative essay:

• A social exchange
• A clear and arguable position
• Good reasons and convincing evidence
• Awareness of your audience
• The proper tone
• Awareness of the opposing view

A social exchange

Your argumentative essay is not a standalone position that your reader encounters from within their own personal void. That is to say, your paper exists within a much larger world full of discussions and arguments and positions and viewpoints, so your paper should feel like it is joining the larger conversations that are taking place in the real world.

You are not the first person to write about the topic you choose to focus on. You’re simply not. Other people—who are quite likely wiser, smarter, more experienced, and more studied than you—have examined, discussed, argued about, and proposed solutions to the issues you raise in your paper, so you shouldn’t ignore the things they say when you put your argument together. You’re contributing your own unique perspective to the conversation, yes, but if you ignore what everyone else has said, you’re not joining the conversation; you’re just mansplaining.^[1]

Instead, make sure you research and find out what other people have proposed and discussed and revised and argued already so that you can make your paper fit into that larger conversation. Find an article or news story that relates to your topic and start your paper by responding directly to those events or ideas, and then lead the reader from there to your position. It feels more organic, and it ties your ideas to real-world events or discussions, making your argument much more engaging and timely.

A clear and arguable position

The single most important thing you can write in an argumentative essay is the one idea that you want your reader to understand and agree with, which is also called the thesis statement.^[2] There are a few expectations that readers have for this single sentence, so you’ll want to make sure that you’ve read and reread and revised your thesis to ensure that it lives up to what the reader expects.

Briefly, a thesis statement should be an arguable statement of one of multiple viewpoints, and it should not be subjective, an obvious fact, or a statement of belief or faith. You want your thesis to be something that someone could disagree with in good faith, meaning that if no one disagrees with it, there’s no reason to write a paper supporting it. Does that make sense? You need it to be something that well-meaning people can take different sides on so that you need to write the paper to persuade your readers to take your point of view instead of the opposition’s. However, this statement of position should not just argue that your personal tastes are best.^[3] Also, don’t write a paper trying to convince your readers that an obvious fact is true,^[4] and don’t try to argue that your personal faith or beliefs are right/best/correct.^[5]

Good reasons and convincing evidence

It is not enough to simply know that you’re right. If you know you’re right but you can’t explain why and show your reader why, then you don’t have an argument. You simply have an unsupported opinion that won’t convince anyone. To make your opinion an argument, you have to add a generous helping of reasons and evidence. This should be gathered from qualified, knowledgeable experts in the field and not just a random dude^[6] on the Internet. Get to the actual sources of good information and research to find reasons that support your position. Get a lot of them. Organize them and share them with your readers in a way that makes sense. You can’t just spout opinions here and expect to convince anyone.

One big part of being convincing is making sure that you avoid relying on common logical fallacies to support your position. If you’ve spent any time reading any comments about controversial topics on social media, you will have seen all kinds of logical fallacies used to support positions. If you’re arguing against one of Donald Trump’s positions, and you make a negative comment about his skin tone, you’ve used an ad hominem attack—an attack on your opponent’s personality, character, or physical attributes instead of an attack on their ideas. If you argue in favor of expanded access to guns because of one time that one person got an aggressive person to back away because they had a gun, you’ve used a hasty generalization—basing your argument on an inadequately small sample size. There are dozens of ways to break your argument through the use of bad logic or faulty reasoning, so you’ll want to make sure your argument is based instead on solid reasons and evidence.

Awareness of your audience

Your argumentative paper will not convince everyone that you’re right. It simply won’t. There are people who are firmly set in their own positions and views, and it doesn’t matter how well you’ve put your argument together—you won’t budge their thinking one tiny little bit. This is completely okay. In fact, you’re not trying to convince those people with your paper. By the same token, there are people who already agree with your position who will continue believing the same thing as you no matter how terrible your argument is. You’re not trying to reach them with your paper, either. So, who is your paper for, then?

Your paper should be trying to reach those people in the middle of the issue who either haven’t made up their mind or who could be persuaded to change their thinking. Because you’re trying to reach this group, you can’t just rely on the tired old oft-repeated points that echo around the chambers of your own thought groups. You have to provide actual reasons and evidence^[7] that someone who is not already passionately devoted to their views might connect with and be moved by. This is also another reason why your tone needs to be carefully monitored.^[8] You need to really think about who your audience is and what they need to read in order to move the needle of their thoughts and beliefs towards your position.

The proper tone

As we’ve noted a couple of times already, the way you talk about your position and the opposition’s views can have a powerful effect on your readers. If you are dismissive, insulting, or offensive towards people who hold opinions that are different from yours, how will you convince them that you have a better position? You simply won’t. You have to be able to write about people who see things differently as sincere people who also want what’s best for the world/the children/society/cats/whatever, just like you do. If you insult the opposition, you might also be insulting readers that currently see things differently from you but who you could have persuaded with your evidence and a better tone.

You also need to be careful with how you write about your own position. You can avoid calling the opposition idiots directly, because you’re a Good Writer, but if you talk too big about your own position and beliefs, you could end up just sounding like a smug know-it-all, and you’ll lose the trust and respect of your readers, too. Without their trust, you can’t convince them that your position is right, and your argument fails.

Awareness of the opposing view

Part of your paper participating in the social exchange we discussed earlier means demonstrating an awareness and understanding of the opposing view. Of course, as noted before, you will want to write about the opposition in kind, sincere, respectful terms, but that doesn’t mean you can’t show your reader why they are wrong. Good arguments typically include at least one counterpoint that someone might make to the position presented and then shows how that counterpoint is either incorrect or misapplied, or discusses how your position has already considered that critique and made adjustments in response.