Find some kind of controversy that surrounds your topic and argue your position within the debate. For example, if you are writing a blog about baseball, perhaps you address the controversy of steroid usage. If you are writing a blog fashion, you might choose a position on the debate that the fashion industry promotes eating disorders in young girls. The important thing here is that you are picking a stance. You should explain why you believe the way you do and incorporate 2 other Internet sources—blogs, websites, etc.—that help you validate your stance.
This post involves the skills that you developed during your synthesis post, but this time you’re trying to be persuasive. If you look back at the I Hate Crocs synthesis earlier, you’ll notice that the person is expressing his/her opinion but not trying to really convince the reader to bend to his/her stance. There’s not enough proof to really do that effectively. This whole post should focus on changing the reader’s opinions to meet your own.
The trick here is to come up with a thesis. A thesis is a statement of intent that tells the reader what you’re going to argue and how you’re going to argue it. Then you’ll want to construct a brief but persuasive argument that vindicates your position on the issue. In order to do this, think about the logic–and logical fallacies–we’ve discussed in class. You will need legitimate proof to substantiate your ideas, so look for outside sources on the Internet that do so.
Below is an example of someone who has chosen to write a blog about living green. His argumentative post is over organic food. The post could have been made better with images, and he needs some proof for his discussion of the side effects of pesticides, antibiotics, and the like, but he does argue and incorporate proof here:
With the Green movement in full swing, many people have been looking at organic foods differently. A lot of people think that organic is just a fancy way of saying “expensive,” but that’s not true. People should be eating organic foods because they really are better for them.
In a recent Huffington Post article, Dr. Walter Crinnon discusses the benefits of organic foods. He explains, “In addition to the vitamins and minerals in foods, are the helpful food chemicals, sometimes called phytonutrients (or nutraceuticals). These compounds — including flavonoids, carotenes and berry pigments — have been found to be responsible for many of the health benefits of foods. These compounds have powerful antioxidant action and help protect our cells from damage. They can also enhance the function of our brains (something we often want for ourselves and others). Well, it turns out that when fruits and vegetables are grown in ‘established’ organic farms, they typically have much higher levels of these healthy food chemicals than conventionally grown foods. This has been shown in apples, pears, tomatoes, potatoes, berries and other organic products. And milk from cows raised organically also contained higher levels of essential fatty acids!” In other words, though some studies have shown that organic foods don’t have much more of the stock nutrients in them–vitamin A, B, and so forth–they do have substantial health benefits. These additional nutrients and chemicals can help prevent cancer by preventing cell damage, they can make us smarter, and are healthier. All of these things are important for adults, but they’re even more important for children. Eating organic young can help prevent other diseases later in life.
More important than what organic foods give us is what they don’t. According toThe Daily Green, many of our staple foods have pesticides that can have many negative effects on our bodies. For example, they write that,Organic dairies cannot feed their cows with grains grown with pesticides, nor can they use antibiotics or growth hormones like rGBH or rbST.” Growth hormones have been traced to premature puberty in children, and the antibiotics that make it into milk are contributing to bacteria that are resistant to treatment. The same article says that many of our fruits and vegetables–like celery, peaches, strawberries, and apples–are treated with many pesticides. Apples, for example, are treated with up to 42 different pesticides that cannot be removed by washing and peeling alone. Some fruit, like strawberries, are transported from countries that use pesticides that are not FDA approved. Buying organic saves people from eating poisons that can cause cancer, kidney damage, and liver damage.
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