lesson plan on writing argumentative essay

A Step-by-Step Plan for Teaching Argumentative Writing

February 7, 2016

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For seven years, I was a writing teacher.  Yes, I was certified to teach the full spectrum of English language arts—literature, grammar and usage, speech, drama, and so on—but my absolute favorite, the thing I loved doing the most, was teaching students how to write.

Most of the material on this site is directed at all teachers. I look for and put together resources that would appeal to any teacher who teaches any subject. That practice will continue for as long as I keep this up. But over the next year or so, I plan to also share more of what I know about teaching students to write. Although I know many of the people who visit here are not strictly English language arts teachers, my hope is that these posts will provide tons of value to those who are, and to those who teach all subjects, including writing.

So let’s begin with argumentative writing, or persuasive writing, as many of us used to call it. This overview will be most helpful to those who are new to teaching writing, or teachers who have not gotten good results with the approach you have taken up to now. I don’t claim to have the definitive answer on how to do this, but the method I share here worked pretty well for me, and it might do the same for you. If you are an experienced English language arts teacher, you probably already have a system for teaching this skill that you like. Then again, I’m always interested in how other people do the things I can already do; maybe you’re curious like that, too.

Before I start, I should note that what I describe in this post is a fairly formulaic style of essay writing. It’s not exactly the 5-paragraph essay, but it definitely builds on that model. I strongly believe students should be shown how to move past those kinds of structures into a style of writing that’s more natural and fitting to the task and audience, but I also think they should start with something that’s pretty clearly organized.

So here’s how I teach argumentative essay writing.

Step 1: Watch How It’s Done

One of the most effective ways to improve student writing is to show them mentor texts, examples of excellent writing within the genre students are about to attempt themselves. Ideally, this writing would come from real publications and not be fabricated by me in order to embody the form I’m looking for. Although most experts on writing instruction employ some kind of mentor text study, the person I learned it from best was Katie Wood Ray in her book Study Driven (links to the book: Bookshop.org | Amazon ).

Since I want the writing to be high quality and the subject matter to be high interest, I might choose pieces like Jessica Lahey’s Students Who Lose Recess Are the Ones Who Need it Most  and David Bulley’s School Suspensions Don’t Work .

I would have students read these texts, compare them, and find places where the authors used evidence to back up their assertions. I would ask students which author they feel did the best job of influencing the reader, and what suggestions they would make to improve the writing. I would also ask them to notice things like stories, facts and statistics, and other things the authors use to develop their ideas. Later, as students work on their own pieces, I would likely return to these pieces to show students how to execute certain writing moves.

Step 2: Informal Argument, Freestyle

Although many students might need more practice in writing an effective argument, many of them are excellent at arguing in person. To help them make this connection, I would have them do some informal debate on easy, high-interest topics. An activity like This or That (one of the classroom icebreakers I talked about last year) would be perfect here: I read a statement like “Women have the same opportunities in life as men.” Students who agree with the statement move to one side of the room, and those who disagree move to the other side. Then they take turns explaining why they are standing in that position. This ultimately looks a little bit like a debate, as students from either side tend to defend their position to those on the other side.

Every class of students I have ever had, from middle school to college, has loved loved LOVED this activity. It’s so simple, it gets them out of their seats, and for a unit on argument, it’s an easy way to get them thinking about how the art of argument is something they practice all the time.

Step 3: Informal Argument, Not so Freestyle

Once students have argued without the support of any kind of research or text, I would set up a second debate; this time with more structure and more time to research ahead of time. I would pose a different question, supply students with a few articles that would provide ammunition for either side, then give them time to read the articles and find the evidence they need.

Next, we’d have a Philosophical Chairs debate (learn about this in my  discussion strategies post), which is very similar to “This or That,” except students use textual evidence to back up their points, and there are a few more rules. Here they are still doing verbal argument, but the experience should make them more likely to appreciate the value of evidence when trying to persuade.

Before leaving this step, I would have students transfer their thoughts from the discussion they just had into something that looks like the opening paragraph of a written argument: A statement of their point of view, plus three reasons to support that point of view. This lays the groundwork for what’s to come.

Step 4: Introduction of the Performance Assessment

Next I would show students their major assignment, the performance assessment that they will work on for the next few weeks. What does this look like? It’s generally a written prompt that describes the task, plus the rubric I will use to score their final product.

Anytime I give students a major writing assignment, I let them see these documents very early on. In my experience, I’ve found that students appreciate having a clear picture of what’s expected of them when beginning a writing assignment. At this time, I also show them a model of a piece of writing that meets the requirements of the assignment. Unlike the mentor texts we read on day 1, this sample would be something teacher-created (or an excellent student model from a previous year) to fit the parameters of the assignment.

Step 5: Building the Base

Before letting students loose to start working on their essays, I make sure they have a solid plan for writing. I would devote at least one more class period to having students consider their topic for the essay, drafting a thesis statement, and planning the main points of their essay in a graphic organizer.

I would also begin writing my own essay on a different topic. This has been my number one strategy for teaching students how to become better writers. Using a document camera or overhead projector, I start from scratch, thinking out loud and scribbling down my thoughts as they come. When students see how messy the process can be, it becomes less intimidating for them. They begin to understand how to take the thoughts that are stirring around in your head and turn them into something that makes sense in writing.

For some students, this early stage might take a few more days, and that’s fine: I would rather spend more time getting it right at the pre-writing stage than have a student go off willy-nilly, draft a full essay, then realize they need to start over. Meanwhile, students who have their plans in order will be allowed to move on to the next step.

Step 6: Writer’s Workshop

The next seven to ten days would be spent in writer’s workshop, where I would start class with a mini-lesson about a particular aspect of craft. I would show them how to choose credible, relevant evidence, how to skillfully weave evidence into an argument, how to consider the needs of an audience, and how to correctly cite sources. Once each mini-lesson was done, I would then give students the rest of the period to work independently on their writing. During this time, I would move around the room, helping students solve problems and offering feedback on whatever part of the piece they are working on. I would encourage students to share their work with peers and give feedback at all stages of the writing process.

If I wanted to make the unit even more student-centered, I would provide the mini-lessons in written or video format and let students work through them at their own pace, without me teaching them. (To learn more about this approach, read this post on self-paced learning ).

As students begin to complete their essays, the mini-lessons would focus more on matters of style and usage. I almost never bother talking about spelling, punctuation, grammar, or usage until students have a draft that’s pretty close to done. Only then do we start fixing the smaller mistakes.

Step 7: Final Assessment

Finally, the finished essays are handed in for a grade. At this point, I’m pretty familiar with each student’s writing and have given them verbal (and sometimes written) feedback throughout the unit; that’s why I make the writer’s workshop phase last so long. I don’t really want students handing in work until they are pretty sure they’ve met the requirements to the best of their ability. I also don’t necessarily see “final copies” as final; if a student hands in an essay that’s still really lacking in some key areas, I will arrange to have that student revise it and resubmit for a higher grade.

So that’s it. If you haven’t had a lot of success teaching students to write persuasively, and if the approach outlined here is different from what you’ve been doing, give it a try. And let’s keep talking: Use the comments section below to share your techniques or ask questions about the most effective ways to teach argumentative writing.

Want this unit ready-made?

If you’re a writing teacher in grades 7-12 and you’d like a classroom-ready unit like the one described above, including mini-lessons, sample essays, and a library of high-interest online articles to use for gathering evidence, take a look at my Argumentative Writing unit. Just click on the image below and you’ll be taken to a page where you can read more and see a detailed preview of what’s included.

What to Read Next

Categories: Instruction , Podcast

Tags: English language arts , Grades 6-8 , Grades 9-12 , teaching strategies

58 Comments

This is useful information. In teaching persuasive speaking/writing I have found Monroe’s Motivated sequence very useful and productive. It is a classic model that immediately gives a solid structure for students.

Thanks for the recommendation, Bill. I will have to look into that! Here’s a link to more information on Monroe’s Motivated sequence, for anyone who wants to learn more: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/MonroeMotivatedSequence.htm

What other sites do you recommend for teacher use on providing effective organizational structure in argumentative writing? As a K-12 Curriculum Director, I find that when teachers connect with and understand the organizational structure, they are more effective in their teaching/delivery.

Hey Jessica, in addition to the steps outlined here, you might want to check out Jenn’s post on graphic organizers . Graphic organizers are a great tool that you can use in any phase of a lesson. Using them as a prewrite can help students visualize the argument and organize their thoughts. There’s a link in that post to the Graphic Organizer Multi-Pack that Jenn has for sale on her Teachers Pay Teachers site, which includes two versions of a graphic organizer you can use specifically for argument organization. Otherwise, if there’s something else you had in mind, let us know and we can help you out. Thanks!

Dear Jennifer Gonzalez,

You are generous with your gift of lighting the path… I hardly ever write (never before) , but I must today… THANK YOU… THANK YOU….THANK YOU… mostly for reading your great teachings… So your valuable teachings will even be easy to benefit all the smart people facing challenge of having to deal with adhd…

I am not a teacher… but forever a student…someone who studied English as 2nd language, with a science degree & adhd…

You truly are making a difference in our World…

Thanks so much, Rita! I know Jenn will appreciate this — I’ll be sure to share with her!

Love it! Its simple and very fruitful . I can feel how dedicated you are! Thanks alot Jen

Great examples of resources that students would find interesting. I enjoyed reading your article. I’ve bookmarked it for future reference. Thanks!

You’re welcome, Sheryl!

Students need to be writing all the time about a broad range of topics, but I love the focus here on argumentative writing because if you choose the model writing texts correctly, you can really get the kids engaged in the process and in how they can use this writing in real-world situations!

I agree, Laura. I think an occasional tight focus on one genre can help them grow leaps and bounds in the skills specific to that type of writing. Later, in less structured situations, they can then call on those skills when that kind of thinking is required.

This is really helpful! I used it today and put the recess article in a Google Doc and had the kids identify anecdotal, statistic, and ‘other’ types of evidence by highlighting them in three different colors. It worked well! Tomorrow we’ll discuss which of the different types of evidence are most convincing and why.

Love that, Shanna! Thanks for sharing that extra layer.

Greetings Ms. Gonzales. I was wondering if you had any ideas to help students develop the cons/against side of their argument within their writing? Please advise. Thanks.

Hi Michael,

Considering audience and counterarguments are an important part of the argumentative writing process. In the Argumentative Writing unit Jenn includes specific mini-lessons that teach kids how, when and where to include opposing views in their writing. In the meantime, here’s a video that might also be helpful.

Hi, Thank you very much for sharing your ideas. I want to share also the ideas in the article ‘Already Experts: Showing Students How Much They Know about Writing and Reading Arguments’ by Angela Petit and Edna Soto…they explain a really nice activity to introduce argumentative writing. I have applied it many times and my students not only love it but also display a very clear pattern as the results in the activity are quite similar every time. I hope you like it.

Lorena Perez

I’d like to thank you you for this excellence resource. It’s a wonderful addition to the informative content that Jennifer has shared.

What do you use for a prize?

I looked at the unit, and it looks and sounds great. The description says there are 4 topics. Can you tell me the topics before I purchase? We start argument in 5th grade, and I want to make sure the topics are different from those they’ve done the last 5 years before purchasing. Thanks!

Hi Carrie! If you go to the product page on TPT and open up the preview, you’ll see the four topics on the 4th page in more detail, but here they are: Social Networking in School (should social media sites be blocked in school?), Cell Phones in Class, Junk Food in School, and Single-Sex Education (i.e., genders separated). Does that help?

I teach 6th grade English in a single gendered (all-girls) class. We just finished an argument piece but I will definitely cycle back your ideas when we revisit argumentation. Thanks for the fabulous resources!

Glad to hear it, Madelyn!

I’m not a writing teacher and honestly haven’t been taught on how to teach writing. I’m a history teacher. I read this and found it helpful but have questions. First I noticed that amount of time dedicated to the task in terms of days. My questions are how long is a class period? I have my students for about 45 minutes. I also saw you mentioned in the part about self-paced learning that mini-lessons could be written or video format. I love these ideas. Any thoughts on how to do this with almost no technology in the room and low readers to non-readers? I’m trying to figure out how to balance teaching a content class while also teaching the common core skills. Thank you for any consideration to my questions.

Hey Jones, To me, a class period is anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour; definitely varies from school to school. As for the question about doing self-paced with very little tech? I think binders with written mini-lessons could work well, as well as a single computer station or tablet hooked up to a class set of videos. Obviously you’d need to be more diligent about rotating students in and out of these stations, but it’s an option at least. You might also give students access to the videos through computers in other locations at school (like the library) and give them passes to watch. The thing about self-paced learning, as you may have seen in the self-paced post , is that if students need extra teacher support (as you might find with low readers or non-readers), they would spend more one-on-one time with the teacher, while the higher-level students would be permitted to move more quickly on their own. Does that help?

My primary goal for next semester is to increase academic discussion and make connections from discussion to writing, so I love how you launch this unit with lessons like Philosophical Chairs. I am curious, however, what is the benefit of the informal argument before the not-so-informal argument? My students often struggle to listen to one another, so I’m wondering if I should start with the more formal, structured version. Or, am I overthinking the management? Thanks so much for input.

Yikes! So sorry your question slipped through, and we’re just now getting to this, Sarah. The main advantage of having kids first engage in informal debate is that it helps them get into an argumentative mindset and begin to appreciate the value of using research to support their claims. If you’ve purchased the unit, you can read more about this in the Overview.

My 6th graders are progressing through their argumentative essay. I’m providing mini lessons along the way that target where most students are in their essay. Your suggestions will be used. I’ve chosen to keep most writing in class and was happy to read that you scheduled a lot of class time for the writing. Students need to feel comfortable knowing that writing is a craft and needs to evolve over time. I think more will get done in class and it is especially important for the struggling writers to have peers and the teacher around while they write. Something that I had students do that they liked was to have them sit in like-topic groups to create a shared document where they curated information that MIGHT be helpful along the way. By the end of the essay, all will use a fantastic add-on called GradeProof which helps to eliminate most of the basic and silly errors that 6th graders make.

Debbi! I LOVE the idea of a shared, curated collection of resources! That is absolutely fantastic! Are you using a Google Doc for this? Other curation tools you might consider are Padlet and Elink .

thanks v much for all this information

Love this! What do you take as grades in the meantime? Throughout this 2 week stretch?

Ideally, you wouldn’t need to take grades at all, waiting until the final paper is done to give one grade. If your school requires more frequent grades, you could assign small point values for getting the incremental steps done: So in Step 3 (when students have to write a paragraph stating their point of view) you could take points for that. During the writer’s workshop phase, you might give points for completion of a rough draft and participation points for peer review (ideally, they’d get some kind of feedback on the quality of feedback they give to one another). Another option would be to just give a small, holistic grade for each week based on the overall integrity of their work–are they staying on task? Making small improvements to their writing each day? Taking advantage of the resources? If students are working diligently through the process, that should be enough. But again, the assessment (grades) should really come from that final written product, and if everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing during the workshop phase, most students should have pretty good scores on that final product. Does that help?

Awesome Step 2! Teaching mostly teenagers in Northern Australia I find students’ verbal arguments are much more finely honed than their written work.

To assist with “building the base” I’ve always found sentence starters an essential entry point for struggling students. We have started using the ‘PEARL’ method for analytical and persuasive writing.

If it helps here a free scaffold for the method:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/FREE-Paragraph-Scaffold-PEEL-to-PEARL-3370676

Thanks again,

Thank you for sharing this additional resource! It’s excellent!

I’ve been scouring the interwebs looking for some real advice on how I can help my struggling 9th grader write better. I can write. Since it comes naturally for me, I have a hard time breaking it down into such tiny steps that he can begin to feel less overwhelmed. I LOVE the pre-writing ideas here. My son is a fabulous arguer. I need to help him use those powers for the good of his writing skills. Do you have a suggestion on what I else I can be using for my homeschooled son? Or what you may have that could work well for home use?

Hi Melinda,

You might be interested in taking a look at Jenn’s Argumentative Writing unit which she mentions at the end of the post . Hope this helps!

Mam it would be good if you could post some steps of different writing and some samples as well so it can be useful for the students.

Hi Aalia! My name is Holly, and I work as a Customer Experience Manager for Cult of Pedagogy. It just so happens that in the near future, Jenn is going to release a narrative writing unit, so keep an eye out for that! As far as samples, the argumentative writing unit has example essays included, and I’m sure the narrative unit will as well. But, to find the examples, you have to purchase the unit from Teachers Pay Teachers.

I just want to say that this helped me tremendously in teaching argument to 8th Graders this past school year, which is a huge concept on their state testing in April. I felt like they were very prepared, and they really enjoyed the verbal part of it, too! I have already implemented these methods into my unit plan for argument for my 11th grade class this year. Thank you so much for posting all of these things! : )

-Josee` Vaughn

I’m so glad to hear it, Josee!!

Love your blog! It is one of the best ones.

I am petrified of writing. I am teaching grade 8 in September and would love some suggestions as I start planning for the year. Thanks!

This is genius! I can’t wait to get started tomorrow teaching argument. It’s always something that I have struggled with, and I’ve been teaching for 18 years. I have a class of 31 students, mostly boys, several with IEPs. The self-paced mini-lessons will help tremendously.

So glad you liked it, Britney!

My students will begin the journey into persuasion and argument next week and your post cemented much of my thinking around how to facilitate the journey towards effective, enthusiastic argumentative writing.

I use your rubrics often to outline task expectations for my students and the feedback from them is how useful breaking every task into steps can be as they are learning new concepts.

Additionally, we made the leap into blogging as a grade at https://mrsdsroadrunners.edublogs.org/2019/01/04/your-future/ It feels much like trying to learn to change a tire while the car is speeding down the highway. Reading your posts over the past years was a factor in embracing the authentic audience. Thank You! Trish

I love reading and listening to your always helpful tips, tricks, and advice! I was wondering if you had any thoughts on creative and engaging ways to have students share their persuasive writing? My 6th students are just finishing up our persuasive writing where we read the book “Oh, Rats” by Albert Marrin and used the information gathered to craft a persuasive piece to either eliminate or protect rats and other than just reading their pieces to one another, I have been trying to think of more creative ways to share. I thought about having a debate but (un)fortunately all my kids are so sweet and are on the same side of the argument – Protect the Rats! Any ideas?

Hi Kiley! Thanks for the positive feedback! So glad to hear that you are finding value in Cult of Pedagogy! Here are a few suggestions that you may be interested in trying with your students:

-A gallery walk: Students could do this virtually if their writing is stored online or hard copies of their writing. Here are some different ways that you could use gallery walks: Enliven Class Discussions With Gallery Walks

-Students could give each other feedback using a tech tool like Flipgrid . You could assign students to small groups or give them accountability partners. In Flipgrid, you could have students sharing back and forth about their writing and their opinions.

I hope this helps!

I love the idea of mentor texts for all of these reading and writing concepts. I saw a great one on Twitter with one text and it demonstrated 5-6 reasons to start a paragraph, all in two pages of a book! Is there a location that would have suggestions/lists of mentor texts for these areas? Paragraphs, sentences, voice, persuasive writing, expository writing, etc. It seems like we could share this info, save each other some work, and curate a great collection of mentor text for English Language Arts teachers. Maybe it already exists?

Hi Maureen,

Here are some great resources that you may find helpful:

Craft Lessons Second Edition: Teaching Writing K-8 Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts and Mentor Texts, 2nd edition: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6

Thanks so much! I’ll definitely look into these.

I love the steps for planning an argumentative essay writing. When we return from Christmas break, we will begin starting a unit on argumentative writing. I will definitely use the steps. I especially love Step #2. As a 6th grade teacher, my students love to argue. This would set the stage of what argumentative essay involves. Thanks for sharing.

So glad to hear this, Gwen. Thanks for letting us know!

Great orientation, dear Jennifer. The step-by-step carefully planned pedagogical perspectives have surely added in the information repository of many.

Hi Jennifer,

I hope you are well. I apologise for the incorrect spelling in the previous post.

Thank you very much for introducing this effective instruction for teaching argumentative writing. I am the first year PhD student at Newcastle University, UK. My PhD research project aims to investigate teaching argumentative writing to Chinese university students. I am interested in the Argumentative Writing unit you have designed and would like to buy it. I would like to see the preview of this book before deciding to purchase it. I clicked on the image BUT the font of the preview is so small and cannot see the content clearly. I am wondering whether it could be possible for you to email me a detailed preview of what’s included. I would highly appreciate if you could help me with this.

Thank you very much in advance. Looking forward to your reply.

Take care and all the very best, Chang

Hi Chang! Jenn’s Argumentative Writing Unit is actually a teaching unit geared toward grades 7-12 with lessons, activities, etc. If you click here click here to view the actual product, you can click on the green ‘View Preview’ button to see a pretty detailed preview of what’s offered. Once you open the preview, there is the option to zoom in so you can see what the actual pages of the unit are like. I hope this helps!

Great Content!

Another teacher showed me one of your posts, and now I’ve read a dozen of them. With teaching students to argue, have you ever used the “What’s going on in this picture?” https://www.nytimes.com/column/learning-whats-going-on-in-this-picture?module=inline I used it last year and thought it was a non-threatening way to introduce learners to using evidence to be persuasive since there was no text.

I used to do something like this to help kids learn how to make inferences. Hadn’t thought of it from a persuasive standpoint. Interesting.

this is a very interesting topic, thanks!

Hi! I’m a teacher too! I was looking for inspiration and I found your article and thought you might find this online free tool interesting that helps make all students participate meaningfully and engage in a topic. https://www.kialo-edu.com/

This tool is great for student collaboration and to teach argumentative writing in an innovative way. I hope this helps!

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Lesson Plan

Argument writing: claim, reasons, and evidence, view aligned standards, learning objectives.

• Students will be able to identify the three main parts of a written argument.
• Students will be able to outline an argument essay by stating a claim, listing reasons, and providing evidence.

Introduction

• Ask students to think about the following statement and be prepared to state whether they agree or disagree, and list one reason: *Dogs are better pets than cats. *
• Call on students to respond to the statement and to list their reasons. When they give a reason (for example, “Dogs are more fun”), press them to provide evidence (such as, “Dogs can be trained" or "Dogs can fetch”).
• Do this several times, making up new statements that you think will inspire your students. (“Beyonce is the best performer,” or “Football is the best sport”).

5 Top Persuasive Writing Lesson Plans for Students and Teachers

The purpose of any persuasive writing text is to persuade the reader of a particular point of view or to take a specific course of action. Persuasive texts come in many different forms, including, but not limited to, essays, editorials, letters, advertisements, and reviews. While persuasive texts come in many shapes and sizes, they all share standard features.

Persuasive texts employ a wide variety of different rhetorical strategies and techniques to achieve their ends. For example, they’ll use emotive language and rhetorical questions. Images are sometimes used to entice or appeal to the reader or viewer. 

Advertising is one key form of persuasive writing . It makes vigorous use of all the tools in the persuasive writing toolbox as it strives to sell goods or services to the reader.

In this article, you’ll learn how to take your students from reluctant salespersons to master marketers in a lightning-fast five days. 

Students will first learn how the various persuasive strategies work before incorporating them into their advertisements. We have comprehensive guides to persuasive writing and advertisements you should explore also.

So, let’s get started!

Persuasive Writing Lesson Plan 1: Identify the Key Features of Adverts

Before your students will be able to produce their own well-written advertisements, they’ll need to be well-versed in all the tricks up the skilful salesperson’s sleeves.

One of the most productive ways for students to do this is through reverse engineering.

Organize your students into small groups or pairs and distribute print advertisements gleaned from various sources such as magazines, newspapers, and posters. You could also show projections of some sample advertisements projected onto the whiteboard to facilitate this exercise.

Now, ask the students to examine the advertisements and answer the following question: 

What techniques do the advertisers use to get our attention?

Challenge the students to go beyond the pretty obvious features of advertisements, e.g. branding, slogans, and testimonials, to also look at more subtle techniques such as the use and interplay of images and various other effects created by language choices and figurative devices. 

When the students have finished their discussions, give them feedback as a whole class and use their responses to compile a master list of the various features they have identified. 

Some features suggested by the class might include:

• Emotive language
• Exaggeration
• Appealing adjectives
• Powerful verbs
• Strong adverbs
• Contact details
• Alliteration
• Rhetorical questions
• Testimonials

Once you have compiled a master list of persuasive strategies and techniques used in advertising, these can handily be turned into checklists that the students can use when producing their own advertisements later.

Persuasive Writing Lesson Plan 2: Analyze an Advert

Now, the students have a solid understanding of the different features of advertisements and a checklist to work from; it’s time for them to analyze an advert in more detail. 

Not only will this prove a valuable exercise to help prepare your students for producing their own advertisements later in the week, but it will also serve as an excellent task to improve your students’ media literacy skills. It may even help to innoculate them from media manipulation in the future.

To get started on their advertisement analysis, they’ll need to source a suitable advertisement to look at in detail. 

Older and higher-ability students may be fit to make their own choices regarding which advertisement to analyze. If this is the case, perhaps they can choose an advert for a product they like or a product or service in a category that interests them greatly. 

Allowing your students some say in the ads they analyze will help fuel their interest and enthusiasm when creating their own advertisements later.

However, it might be best to choose a sample advertisement for younger students and those of lower ability – or at least offer a pre-vetted, limited choice. They will most likely have enough to contend with already!

When students have a suitable advertisement to hand, please encourage them to use their checklist from yesterday’s lesson to explore how the ad works. The students should then write a paragraph identifying the various techniques used in the advertisement and their effect.

Challenge the students to write another paragraph or two, considering what makes the advertisement work – or not, as the case may be. Ask them to consider where the advertisement could be improved. Could the slogan be catchier? How about the logo? Does it convey the brand’s identity appropriately? Are the images used in the advertisement optimal?

When the students have finished their paragraphs, they can display their advert and their analysis and share their thoughts with the class.

Persuasive Writing Lesson Plan 3: Plan an Advertisement

At this stage, your students should have a good understanding of many of the main features of advertisements and had plenty of opportunities to see examples of these in action. Now it’s time for them to begin to plan for writing their own advertisements. Here are some areas for your students to think about when starting the planning process.

The Purpose and Audience

Like any other writing type, students will need to identify both the purpose and the audience for their advertisements bef ore putting pen to paper.

The purpose of any advertisement is to sell goods or services. Precisely what goods or services are being sold is the first question that needs to be answered.

Students might like to focus on the goods or services advertised in the adverts they’ve been exploring over the previous two days. Or, if they prefer, they might like to choose something new entirely.

Once they’ve chosen what they’re selling, students will need to identify who they will sell it to. Scattershot advertisements that attempt to sell to everyone often end up selling to no one.

One effective way to help focus an advert is to define a ‘buyer persona’ first. This is a profile of the hypothetical buyer who the ad will target.

Students can consider the following characteristics to help them develop their buyer’s persona:

• Education level
• Marital status
• Likes/Dislikes
• Who they trust
• What they read/watch

The Brand Name

The next stage is for the student to decide on a name for their company. This should usually be something relatively short and memorable, and appealing to the target audience.

Generally, the student will need to come up with at least four or five ideas first. They can then choose the best. 

It can be a helpful practice for the student to look at the brand names for companies selling similar goods and services. A little internet research will be beneficial here.

Now it’s time for students to jot down ideas for their brand’s slogan. Slogans are short and punchy phrases that help make brands more memorable for customers. 

Slogans often employ literary devices such as alliteration, puns, or rhyme. They don’t always have to be the most meaningful things in the world; it’s more important that they’re memorable. Think Nike’s Just to Do It or McDonald’s I’m Lovin’ It – not the most meaning-rich phrases in the world but instantly recognizable!

The Body Copy

This part of the advertisement will contain the bulk of the writing. It’s where the students will get to use the various techniques and strategies they’ve explored in the previous activities.

Despite containing most of the ad’s text, advertising copy is usually concise and to the point. Student’s should strive to get the main points across in the fewest words possible. Nothing turns readers off faster than impenetrable walls of text.

To help organize the text, students may use bullet points and subheadings. They should be sure to include any specific information or specifications that they want the reader to know about the product or service. 

The language chosen should also be appropriate for speaking to the audience that they have defined earlier.

The Call to Action

The Call to Action – commonly referred to as the CTA , usually comes at the end of an advertisement.

The CTA typically comprises a few sentences that invite the reader to take a particular course of action. Normally, to buy the advertised goods or service.

However, not all CTAs focus on getting the reader to make an immediate purchase. Some, for example, aim to get the reader to provide their contact details so they can be sold to later. 

Students need to first define what their Call to Action will invite readers to do. They will then need to choose a strong imperative that will call on the reader to take that specific action. Commonly used verbs that urge readers to take action include subscribe, join, buy, etc.

The CTA must be clear and specific; the reader should be in no doubt about what the advertisement is asking them to do. 

Often, the CTA will create a sense of urgency by limiting special offers by time. 

As part of the planning process, students should use some of their time in today’s session to think about and make some notes on options they might like to include in the final drafts of their Call to Action.

Persuasive Writing Lesson Plan 4: Create the Advertisement

Day 4, already! This is the day students will try to bring all the elements together. They’ll work to complete their advertisements by the end of today’s session.

You may like to have the students collaborating to produce their ads or working individually. Either way, reinforce the importance of attention to detail in their work. 

The main focus for persuasive texts of any kind, advertisements included, shouldn’t be length but, instead, it should be on how effectively it persuades the reader to take the desired action.

Students should incorporate their planning from yesterday and refer to their checklists as they create. As precise language is so essential to effective marketing, encourage students to use thesauruses to help them find just the right word for their copy.

When students have had a chance to draft their advertisements, they can then get into small groups and compare their work. This is an opportunity for students to provide each other with constructive criticism. 

They can use their checklists as a basis to provide this criticism. Students can then revise their advertisements in light of the advice they’ve received in their groups.

Persuasive Writing Lesson Plan 5: Further Practice in the Art of Persuasion

In the process of comparing their work with each other, with reference to the criteria they’ve worked on earlier in the week, students will no doubt identify areas they are strong in and other areas where they are weaker.

Day 5’s activities should offer students an opportunity to practice those areas identified as needing further work to bring them up to par.

For example, students can practice their persuasion skills by moving their focus from printed ads to other types of marketing endeavours that utilise the arts of persuasion.

Where students struggled to employ literary devices in their advertising copy, they may benefit from creating a radio jingle or radio ad for their product or service. As this type of ad can contain no visual imagery to support, writing a radio jingle or ad will force the student to pay particular attention to verbal imagery, rhyme, alliteration, etc. 

If the testimonials used in the first advertisement were unconvincing, perhaps the student will benefit from isolating this strategy to focus exclusively on effective testimonial writing. They should spend some time researching testimonials and how to write them effectively. 

For example, testimonials should usually be:

• Short and to the point
• Conversational in tone
• Authentic (use a name, photo, job title, etc.)
• Specific about the benefits
• Directed at overcoming objections.

Once students have a good handle on how these work, they should put their new-found knowledge into practice and get writing as soon as possible.

This research-then-practice model can help the student improve in whatever particular area of persuasion that needs work – as identified in yesterday’s activity.

Getting good at persuasive writing demands our students to develop their knowledge and abilities with a broad range of skills and strategies. 

Advertising copy is a highly concentrated form of persuasive writing and, therefore, an excellent means for our students to gain lots of practice in a short space of time. 

And, as the saying goes, a good start is half the work, so set your class of creative copywriters on the road to marketing mastery today!

ARTICLES RELATED TO PERSUASIVE WRITING LESSON PLANS

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How to Write an Advertisement: A Complete Guide for Students and Teachers

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Writing An Argumentative Essay: Planning The Essay

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Writing an Argumentative Essay: Planning the Essay

This writing an argumentative essay: planning the essay lesson plan also includes:.

• Full Grade 7 ELA Module 2a (.pdf)
• Full Grade 7 ELA Module 2a Updates: June 2015 (.pdf)
• Full Grade 7 ELA Module 2a, Unit 1 (.pdf)
• Grade 7 ELA Module 2a: Unit 1, Lesson 16 (.html)
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A self-assessment helps scholars take ownership of their learning. Using the resource, pupils begin a Writing Improvement Tracker to develop awareness of their writing strengths and challenges. Next, they complete worksheets to plan their argumentative essays based on the novel Lyddie by Katherine Paterson. 

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Instructional ideas.

• Find and discuss models of strong argumentative essays 

Classroom Considerations

• Part 16 of 20 consecutive lessons from the Grade 7 ELA Module 2a, Unit 1 series
• Before teaching, make sure students have access to their reflections from Module 1, Unit 3, Lesson 6
• Provides strategies for meeting diverse learners' instructional needs
• Includes a model essay planner for reference

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Argument Essay Lesson Plans

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Description.

Looking for argument essay lesson plans to help your advanced high school English students write stronger essays? This 5-week argument essay unit includes easy-to-use printable and digital (Google Slides) lessons to help your students learn how to develop their argument with specific evidence and commentary.

What's in each argument essay lesson plan?

Week 1: Students will review argument essay writing vocabulary and will practice constructing an argument in response to fun prompts.

Week 2: Students will complete activities in which they argue about the role of creativity in education.

Week 3: Students will complete activities to help them assert a position on the value of competition.

Week 4: Students will complete activities to help them assert a position on the value of boldness/courage.

Week 5: Students will complete activities to help them assert a position on the value of defiant deeds.

Throughout the unit, students will learn how to construct a defensible thesis statement and support their claim with specific evidence and commentary.

Additionally, students will research historical figures and events to help generate specific evidence to support their claims.

This resource is a printable PDF file. It is not editable. Within the resource, each week-at-a-glance page has links to digital versions of the activities so that teachers can assign the work on Google Slides (if desired.) Portions of the Google Slides are editable.

Answer keys and sample answers are included.

Does this help with AP Lang Argument Essays?

This resource was designed with honors and advanced English students in mind. The skills within this unit align with the skills taught in AP Lang. However, this resource is not endorsed by or affiliated with The College Board.

Looking for rhetorical analysis lesson plans? Check out Coach Hall's 9-week Rhetorical Analysis Unit.

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And in Conclusion: Inquiring into Strategies for Writing Effective Conclusions

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• Related Resources

As part of the drafting and revision process for a current literary analysis essay (or another type of argument), students first participate in initial peer review to improve the argument in their essay. Then they inquire into published tips and advice on writing conclusions and analyze sample conclusions with a partner before choosing two strategies they would like to try in their own writing, drafting a conclusion that employs each.  After writing two different conclusions and conferring with a peer about them, they choose one and reflect on why they chose it, as well as what they learned about writing conclusions and the writing process more broadly.  Though this lesson is framed around an argumentative literary essay, its structure could be easily adapted to other written forms.

Featured Resources

List of Online Resources for Writing Conclusions :  Organized in two parts, these resources allow students to inquire into different published advice on writing conclusions to academic essays and then offer students sample essays to review and critique.

Conclusion Inquiry Guide :  Students use these prompts to guide their inquiry into advice on writing conclusions and sample argumentative essays.

From Theory to Practice

The conclusions to student essays are often formulaic restatements of the key ideas of their introductions.  While there is fairly wide agreement on strategies for constructing and improving introductions, there are fewer resources investigating “how to conclude,” partly perhaps because of the very context- and piece-specific nature of what a conclusion might do.

This lesson, then, draws heavily on two ideas from the more foundational NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing to guide students through inquiry into the genre of the argumentative essay and what function the conclusion can serve:

“Developing writers require support. This support can best come through carefully designed writing instruction oriented toward acquiring new strategies and skills.”

“As is the case with many other things people do, getting better at writing requires doing it -- a lot. This means actual writing, not merely listening to lectures about writing, doing grammar drills, or discussing readings. The more people write, the easier it gets and the more they are motivated to do it.”

Students participating in this lesson are supported in the specific task of drafting multiple conclusions to an essay to determine which is most effective, a process that itself involves significant writing to achieve.

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 4. Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
• 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
• 7. Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources (e.g., print and nonprint texts, artifacts, people) to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience.

Materials and Technology

• Access to Internet-connected computers
• Peer Response Sheet
• Conclusion Inquiry Guide
• Conclusion Peer Response Guide

Organized in two parts, these resources allow students to inquire into different published advice on writing conclusions to academic essays and then offer students sample essays to review and critique.on

Preparation

A student recently pointed out that essay expectation sheets and rubrics often give detailed descriptions of or advice about how to approach the introduction and body paragraphs, and then offer very brief attention to the conclusion.  She noted that they might say something along the lines of “Bring your paper to a close without restating the introduction directly.”  This seems to be a symptom of teachers ourselves under-thinking what can make a conclusion effective.  To prepare for this lesson, first reflect on your own assignment sheets, rubrics, and beliefs about what a conclusion does in an argumentative essay.  Are there principles that cross multiple types of writing (bridging the reader from the specifics of the essay back to the general world)?  Are there some that are more specific to certain types of essays (the call for social action, for example)?  As part of this work, preview the Online Resources for Writing Conclusions and consider how some of the suggestions align with your own thinking about effective conclusions.

• This lesson assumes some familiarity with essay writing and works best when students have drafted most of an essay except for a conclusion.  Consider using the Essay Map to facilitate this process.
• This lesson assumes some familiarity with effective peer response practice  Consider using ideas and strategies from Peer Edit with Perfection: Effective Strategies or Peer Review .
• Make copies of all necessary handouts.
• Arrange for access to Internet-connected computers for Sessions Two and Three, ideally one computer for every two students.
• Check links in the List of Online Resources for Writing Conclusions to ensure students can access all necessary resources.

Student Objectives

Students will

revise an existing essay in preparation for writing a conclusion.

develop through inquiry a repertoire of strategies for concluding a literary analysis essay.

draft multiple conclusions and select one based on peer conferring.

• reflect on their choice of submitted conclusion and learning throughout the lesson.

Session One

• Begin the lesson by eliciting from students various advice they have gotten in the past about writing conclusions, as well as strategies they have used before to conclude their academic writing.  If students have access to their writing folders or digital portfolios, give them time to scan over conclusions of past essays.
• As students share, record or project their responses and ask them to reflect on how useful that advice has been or how successfully those strategies have served them.  Be sure to encourage discussion of what students think of as “bad conclusions,” even when those conclusions seem to be following advice that they have gotten.  Discussion will likely generate a shared understanding that writing conclusions is a common challenge, and that no certain approach or advice always works all the time.
• Explain that in this lesson, students will inquire into different approaches they might take to conclude their current essay with an eye toward building a larger repertoire of strategies they might use in crafting conclusions in the future.  Emphasize that the goal of this lesson is not to develop “one right way” to conclude a paper or essay, but to increase possibilities for and flexibility in  their writing.
• Share with students that a conclusion is typically only as effective as the argument that comes before it, so they will first participate in a peer response activity in this session to improve the existing draft of the essay.
• Explain the expectations for peer revision using the Peer Response Sheet to guide the conversation.  After trading essays and first reading drafts in their entirety, students should answer the questions on the Peer Response Sheet to provide feedback to their partner.
• Give students time to read and respond to a partner’s essay and then share and clarify feedback before asking students to set three revision goals for the next session at the bottom of the Peer Response Sheet .
• Set or agree upon a date for the next session (probably not the next day) and share the expectation that students come to class with a revised essay that works toward the goals they set in this session.

Session Two

• Inform students that in the next few sessions, they will be investigating some Online Resources for Writing Conclusions to generate new ideas and analyzing sample essays for their effectiveness.
• Share the link to the List of Online Resources for Writing Conclusions and distribute copies of the Conclusion Inquiry Guide , explaining how they will use the two together: first to investigate advice for writing conclusions, and then to read sample essays to evaluate in light of that advice (in the next session).
• Direct students, perhaps in their peer response pairs from the previous session, to investigate the Online Resources for Writing Conclusions and complete the Conclusion Inquiry Guide .
• Depending on your students’ levels of independence, you may wish to provide additional guidance in investigating the Online Resources for Writing Conclusions .  You might, for example, set a timer for each of the sites in the Tips/Advice section and after students have investigated, facilitate a full class discussion about what they noticed or will put on their Conclusion Inquiry Guide .  Also consider asking them to talk through with their partner some of the strategies on their current essay.  The strategies on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Writing Center: Conclusions website lend themselves particularly well to this kind of work.
• If time permits after pairs have finished, ask them to find another pair with whom to share their impressions, findings, and ideas.
• Collect the Conclusion Inquiry Guide to return to students in the next session for analyzing sample essays.

Session Three

• Open this session by returning students’ Conclusion Inquiry Guides and drawing their attention to the second half of the guide, which prompts students to choose and critique two of the essays from the Online Resources for Writing Conclusions .
• Point students to the Online Resources for Writing Conclusions and be sure they understand the expectations for the activity: to read the essays in light of the tips and strategies they developed in the previous session and to point out the strengths and weaknesses of the conclusions.
• Depending on your students’ level of independence, consider reading and analyzing one of the four essays together as a class before asking pairs to evaluate and analyze.  Adaptations to this part of the activity might include projecting the essays, but covering the conclusion.  Then have student pairs brainstorm possible ways they might conclude before comparing their conclusions to what was written. Or, ask student pairs to rewrite one of the conclusions based on the feedback they offer.  Regardless, remind students to note their impressions in the spaces provided on the Inquiry Guide .
• Near the end of the session, bring the class back together to debrief what they noticed and learned, focusing specifically on generating ideas that they might try in their own writing.
• Ask students to re-read and bring with them their essay drafts before the next session.

Session Four

Ask students to get out their essay drafts and review their Inquiry Guides .  Explain that in this session, they will choose two techniques they are interested in “trying on” to conclude their essay.  Point out that many of the strategies will require additional revision to the body of the essay (particularly the introduction).

Give students a few minutes to talk through their ideas with their peer response partners or another nearby classmate.

Have students get out two sheets of paper or open two documents and give them time to draft a conclusion that tries each of the strategies.  Circulate the room to assist students in decision making and drafting, and encourage students to continue to confer with their peer review partner as necessary.

• As students complete drafting their two conclusions, ask them to bring a copy of both versions of their essay to the next session, one with each possible conclusion.

Session Five

• Explain to students that in this session, they will meet again in their peer response pairs to provide one another feedback on their current essay drafts and conclusions.
• Share the Conclusion Peer Response Guide and explain its expectations and how it will shape their interaction in the pair.
• Give students time to read each other’s essays, with particular attention paid to the conclusions, and provide one another feedback on their conclusions using the  Conclusion Peer Response Guide .
• Close the lesson by asking students to share with the full group ideas, strategies, and questions they still have about writing effective conclusions, both for this essay and for academic writing in general.
• Explain that students should select a conclusion and make any necessary revisions to it and to the rest of the essay before submitting it.  On the day papers are due, also consider having students respond to the reflection questions in the Assessment section below.

Have students develop a Web resource of their own, similar to those in the lesson, to share their learning about effective conclusions.  Include links to their essays, with multiple versions of conclusions and commentary about their effectiveness.

• Use this inquiry model to support students in working through other trouble spots in academic writing, including introductions, transitions, developing support, or writing in different genres/styles.

Student Assessment / Reflections

When students submit their essays, ask them to reflect on their learning by responding to questions such as these:

How do the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion work together to make a coherent argument?

Why did you choose to submit this conclusion rather than the other?

What did you learn about writing conclusions through participation in this activity?

What did you learn about your writing process (and yourself as a writer) by participating in this activity?

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The Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.

Students prepare an already published scholarly article for presentation, with an emphasis on identification of the author's thesis and argument structure.

This strategy guide clarifies the difference between persuasion and argumentation, stressing the connection between close reading of text to gather evidence and formation of a strong argumentative claim about text.

This strategy guide explains the writing process and offers practical methods for applying it in your classroom to help students become proficient writers.

With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.

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Grade 10 English Module: Argumentative Essay

This Self-Learning Module (SLM) is prepared so that you, our dear learners, can continue your studies and learn while at home. Activities, questions, directions, exercises, and discussions are carefully stated for you to understand each lesson.

Each SLM is composed of different parts. Each part shall guide you step-by-step as you discover and understand the lesson prepared for you.

Pre-tests are provided to measure your prior knowledge on lessons in each SLM. This will tell you if you need to proceed on completing this module or if you need to ask your facilitator or your teacher’s assistance for better understanding of the lesson. At the end of each module, you need to answer the post-test to self-check your learning. Answer keys are provided for each activity and test. We trust that you will be honest in using these.

Please use this module with care. Do not put unnecessary marks on any part of this SLM. Use a separate sheet of paper in answering the exercises and tests. And read the instructions carefully before performing each task.

This module was designed and written with you in mind. It is here to help you write your argumentative essay with its parts and features. The scope of this module permits it to be used in many different learning situations. The language used recognizes the diverse vocabulary level of students. The lessons are arranged to follow the standard sequence of the course. But the order in which you read them can be changed to correspond with the textbook you are now using.

The module is divided into two lessons, namely:

• Lesson 1 – Terms in Argumentative Writing
• Lesson 2 – Parts and Features of Argumentative Essay

After going through this module, you are expected to:

1. Get familiar with terms used in argumentation/debate;

2. Identify the parts and features of argumentative essay.

Notes to the Teacher:

Prior to understanding of the lesson on noting details, the student is given a brief background about reading comprehension. The students should be able to get familiar with this term used for plain text and innovative text.

Grade 10 English Quarter 3 Self-Learning Module: Argumentative Essay

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may i ask permission to doenload this? I’ll be using it in my Grade 10 English Class

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How to Plan toward an Assessment The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

On this week’s mini-episode, I want to answer a question from our community about lesson planning. Here it is: “How do you plan? I’m struggling to put together a series of lessons that culminate into a bigger assignment. For example, if I want my students to end up writing a persuasive essay, what would I plan to prepare them to write it? Do you go with a theme? Make it part of a novel study? I’m struggling!” OK, this is a big question, but I’m ready for it.  In today’s episode, we’re digging into planning and demystifying the process. You’ve probably heard the phrase “plan with the end in mind.” The concept of backwards design, now widely used for planning, comes from Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins’ book, Understanding by Design. The University of Illinois’ “Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence” online site has a useful quick summary. Let me give you the speedy version here: First, you figure out what you want your students to be able to do. Then you figure out how they could show that they can do it. Then you plan the activities and assessments that will get them there.  So let’s apply this planning frameworks  to today’s problem - how do you plan a unit around a persuasive essay? The goal is to have students write a strong essay, presumably with some specific characteristics appropriate to their level. Along the way, they can show their mastery of elements of the final work through smaller argument practices, then they’ll show their overall mastery in the essay. But what would be good activities to build in along the way?  The easy go-to for preparing for an essay would be to write lots of short pieces throughout the unit, which really could be centered on anything. You could embed work like this into a novel study, a deep dive into short stories, book clubs, poetry, or even podcasting. This will give you an inviting structure  in which to situate your writing practice. You can practice thesis statements, introductions, text analysis paragraphs, and conclusions based on your larger unit. And you can think about how to come at each one from different angles and with different types of prompts to help students stay interested. You can share mentor texts, incorporate peer review, station work, and writing makerspace elements. There are so many ways to practice these skills.  Here’s how I might plan the first week of a poetry unit focused on a final product of a persuasive essay.  Monday I might do a deep dive on a contemporary poet, sharing two of her performance pieces and doing some creative writing around her work with my students. Then I might share an online article about this poet, arguing that she should have been the winner of a prestigious spoken word poetry competition and ask student to identify the thesis statement in the article and discuss, in partners, whether or not they find the argument convincing.  Tuesday I might look at a contemporary poem in both its written and spoken form, and have a mini debate about which format feels more compelling. Then dive into a mini-lesson on thesis statements and have kids practice writing a thesis for the question we just debated, plus gather two pieces of evidence that could help them make their argument.  Wednesday we might start by trading those theses and giving each other feedback based on a checklist, then move into a pop-up poetry workshop and create performance pieces of our own.  Thursday we might look at a performance piece and work on annotating a text version of it, then again practice developing a thesis statement about it and gathering evidence.  Friday we might start with a mini-lesson on writing a full  introduction and then write a practice introduction around that thesis statement looking at several models, before moving into our regular First Chapter Friday program for choice reading.  Now I’ve planned one week of the unit building toward my final assessment but also moving throu

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Democrats Pushed Biden Aside. Is Eric Adams Next?

For Mayor Eric Adams of New York, watching his party swap President Biden for Vice President Kamala Harris had to be at least a little rattling.

Like Biden, Adams, who is up for re-election next year, is shockingly unpopular. One poll this spring found that just 16 percent of likely voters planned to vote for him. Another, taken in December, found that his approval rating had fallen to 28 percent , the lowest of any mayor since 1996.

In the past few months, three credible Democrats have announced plans to challenge the mayor, all of them from the left.

Scott Stringer, the former comptroller, raised over $ 400,000 . The current comptroller, Brad Lander, has raised more than $650,000 . State Senator Zellnor Myrie raised more than $326,000 over a much shorter time period, of about two months. Thanks to the city’s generous matching fund program, each of these Democrats could mount a serious challenge.

Adams still has a sharp advantage in next year’s mayoral race, where the power of incumbency is generally overwhelming. But there is a sense in the air around City Hall that this mayor may be unusually vulnerable. The big question for Adams and these challengers — in a city where the economy is robust and crime overall is down — is why?

The federal investigation into whether Adams and his campaign illegally directed foreign funds from the Turkish government into their war chest could be one reason, particularly since Adams’s phone was seized by the F.B.I. in November. Another is the arrival of about 180,000 migrants in just over two years, a logistical, budgetary and political nightmare for City Hall, which was caught off guard.

The mayor often seems more interested in gimmicky efforts like his war against rats than the more tedious work of campaigning for the bold policies the city needs, like his excellent housing campaign, known as the City of Yes, aimed at incentivizing much-needed housing development. In a city that is not always progressive but likes to see itself as thoroughly modern, Adams’s political style — which includes a penchant for hiring cronies — feels old, and not in a good way. Other times, he just sounds plain out of touch with the views of many Democratic voters in New York, as when he defended the boorish behavior of top police officials who attacked journalists and judges on social media.

Weighing Adams’s political fortunes, one issue in particular caught my eye: the widespread anger this year, across the city, over the cuts Adams made to the city’s libraries. Pressed to make budget cuts last December, he chose to cut Sunday library service. The measure drew such ire that the funding was restored in June.

It’s getting harder to live in New York, and I think New Yorkers are growing impatient with Adams, whose City Hall often seems to lack a compass. The cost of housing is still soaring. Noise complaints are up . Though most crime is down, New Yorkers still tell pollsters that they feel less safe. It’s a sentiment probably exacerbated by an epidemic of street homelessness and an opioid crisis that has hit New York City in recent years, sending overdose deaths surging .

Adams is working on many of these issues. But three years in, there seems to be an increasing sense that he may not have a clear plan to get life in the country’s largest city firmly back on track from the pandemic that devastated it. Voters in New York may be looking for someone who does.

Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

A Big Oopsie for the Fed

There’s an old joke about a motorist who runs over a pedestrian, then says, “I’m sorry. Let me fix that” — so he backs up and runs over the pedestrian a second time.

Right now, the Federal Reserve is looking like that guy.

The Fed received a lot of criticism for being behind the curve in 2021 and ’22, when it was slow to raise interest rates in the face of rising inflation.

It’s not clear that this delay did significant harm. As Jared Bernstein, the chief White House economic adviser, pointed out in a recent speech , U.S. economic performance during the pandemic and its aftermath stands out among wealthy nations; we experienced similar inflation to our peers while achieving much stronger economic growth:

Still, the Fed’s credibility took a hit.

But it’s now increasingly clear that the Fed is once again behind the curve, in the opposite direction: It has waited too long to cut interest rates as inflation has subsided. Unemployment has been rising, and the latest jobs report , on Friday morning, shows that the rise has now triggered the Sahm Rule, a historically very accurate indicator that the economy has entered a recession.

I wrote about the Sahm Rule this week , warning that it might be triggered but giving reasons not to panic (a view shared by Claudia Sahm herself). And other indicators, like prime-age employment , are still holding up. Nonetheless, the Friday jobs numbers make it very clear that the Fed should have cut rates on Wednesday and probably should have begun cutting earlier this year.

The good news is that the interest rates that matter for the real economy, like 10-year bond rates and mortgage rates, are partly driven not by what the Fed has done but by expectations about what the Fed will do.

So even though the Fed has gotten behind the curve, it may still be able to head off a recession by signaling to markets that it knows that it has ground to make up; we should definitely be looking at a rate cut of half a percentage point (rather than the usual quarter-point move) at its next scheduled meeting, in September, and maybe a before-schedule cut this month if more bad news comes in.

One last point: If the Fed does the right thing, you know that Republicans will claim that it’s a political move to help Democrats. Let’s hope that Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, won’t let himself be bullied into passivity.

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Nicholas Kristof

As the World Looks Elsewhere, Famine Descends on Darfur

Sudan has in this century endured genocide, civil war and partition, and now its crisis has worsened. Famine has officially been declared in part of the Darfur region in western Sudan.

Growing starvation has been apparent for many months, so this is in part a failure of the international community to apply adequate pressure on rival parties in Sudan and to provide adequate resources to address the crisis. Far more attention has been directed to conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, and while that is understandable, the upshot is that children are dying unnecessarily in Sudan.

Malnutrition is widespread around the world — about one-fifth of all children globally are physically stunted from inadequate food — but this only very rarely rises to the level of famine. In the 21st century, this is only the third official famine, after one in Somalia in 2011 and one in South Sudan in 2017.

The famine review committee, a group of independent nutrition experts, declared on Thursday that famine had officially arrived at the Zamzam camp, home to about 500,000 displaced people near the city of El Fasher in Darfur.

The cause of the famine is a civil war underway in Sudan between the army and a militia called the Rapid Support Forces, and the obstacles they have placed to impede humanitarian aid workers. Convoys of trucks have been blocked from delivering aid by the armed factions.

The international failure is particularly stark because a generation ago, Darfur was the site of the 21st century’s first genocide, as the Sudanese government backed Arab militias to slaughter members of three non-Arab Black African ethnic groups. Now the Rapid Support Forces, with backing from countries like the United Arab Emirates, are starting over and committing similar atrocities of murder and rape against the same ethnic groups.

S ome experts believe that a “repeat genocide” is underway. And whatever term one applies to the conflict in Sudan, this famine is one consequence.

“Families who fled horrific violence have been going hungry for months,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the United Nations, who for many months has been calling attention to the crisis. “Children have been eating dirt and leaves, and every day, babies have been starving to death.”

Nonetheless, she said, the two Sudanese armed factions “have chosen to let the Sudanese people starve, systematically blocking humanitarian corridors.” She called on them to immediately allow access and to attend peace talks scheduled for this month in Switzerland.

Genocide and famine deserve a place on top of the international agenda, and if the armed factions are not listening, we should use every diplomatic and military tool to make them back off and allow humanitarian access.

Brent Staples

The Trolls Don’t Understand Harris’s Life Story

Some participants in the roiling discussion about Vice President Kamala Harris’s racial identity are trolls like Donald Trump, who falsely claim that Harris — daughter of an Indian mother and a Black Jamaican father — hasn’t always identified as African American .

The point of this deception is to distort the life story that Harris unfortunately neglects in speeches but tells well in her 2019 memoir, “The Truths We Hold.” The book explains a great many things, including how she gravitated toward Blackness while embracing a richly complex family heritage that includes Indian, American and Caribbean dimensions.

While Harris was growing up in the East Bay area of California, her mother’s side of the family reinforced pride in her South Asian roots while giving Kamala and her sister, Maya, a strong awareness and appreciation of Indian culture. Harris also recalls her family being involved in civil rights demonstrations and gatherings of African American intellectuals.

Her mother — who had an award-winning voice — sang along to the gospel music of Aretha Franklin and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. Harris writes: “My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters. She knew that her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”

Under most circumstances, a student like Harris, whose father was an economics professor at Stanford University , might have attended school there. Instead, she chose Howard University, commonly known as the Mecca of Black education, which opened its doors not long after the Civil War.

Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the campus in almost mystical terms in the book “Between The World and Me”: “The Mecca is a machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark energy of all African peoples and inject it directly into the student body.” While a student, Harris further steeped herself in African American culture, joining the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

Harris’s embrace of Blackness reflected her mother’s encouragement and her own conscious choices. That story will be more widely understood as she takes time to explain it.

Adam Sternbergh

Opinion Culture Editor

Would Kamala Harris Be the First Gen X President?

There’s never been a president who’s a member of Generation X. Whether that would change should Kamala Harris win in November has been a subject of online debate. Is Harris, born in 1964, Gen X? The argument only intensified after she used the phrase “say it to my face,” a distinctly Gen X sentiment.

For some, it’s an open-and-shut case: She’s not. The U.S. Census Bureau defines baby boomers as those born between 1946 and 1964. Harris was born in 1964. Case closed.

However, generational borders are open to interpretation and, over time, a certain intuitive fluidity. Consider this: Generation X the cohort got its name from “Generation X,” the 1991 novel by Douglas Coupland. (Yes, the novel was named for an existing punk band, but that band had disbanded by the early 1980s.) “Generation X” follows a trio of sardonic, disillusioned 20-somethings — some might call them slackers, another term coined around the same time — and it essentially gave culture-watchers a framework and a vocabulary (e.g., “ McJob ”) to understand a generation that was ascendant in the shadow of the boomers.

Coupland, born in 1961, was 29 when the novel was published. At the time, the novel’s own promotional copy contended it was a “salute to the generation born in the late 1950s and 1960s.” Currently, the book’s publisher offers a slightly revised timeline , calling Gen X “the generation born from 1960 to 1978,” expanding the original parameters but still including Coupland and, of course, Harris.

A more compelling argument for Harris’s Gen X bona fides might be that the boomers are named for a post-World War II boom in, well, babies. A baby born in the mid-1960s hardly seems part of a postwar uptick in ardor or optimism. Not to mention that this baby would have been a child during the most distinctive boomer cultural milestones, such as the Summer of Love (1967) and Woodstock (1969). Now consider that Harris was a 20-something in 1991, the year Nirvana released the Gen X anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Some might argue that Harris is part of Generation Jones — a cohort for the late boomers who don’t logically fit with those born in the 1940s. The problem with this argument is that Generation Jones only comes up in generational-hair-splitting arguments like this one. And if you accept the originalist interpretation, bound by Coupland’s parameters, this argument resolves in a different way. We’ve already had one Gen X president: Barack Obama, born in 1961, the same year as Coupland.

Which leads to the most important point: Generational signifiers are largely an arbitrary parlor game, so they shouldn’t be bound by hard and fast Census Bureau rules. Insofar as Harris’s political narrative might include having once been overlooked and underappreciated, she certainly feels, at least to members of Gen X, like she’s one of us.

Serge Schmemann

The Joyful Release of Evan Gershkovich Came at a High Price

That more than a dozen people unjustly incarcerated in Russia have been released is obviously great news. As a journalist who spent a decade reporting from Moscow, I am particularly elated to know that Evan Gershkovich, a fine reporter for The Wall Street Journal, does not have to spend another day in Russian detention.

The treason charge against him was a pathetic concoction. But the K.G.B. in Soviet days and Vladimir Putin’s mob today are congenitally incapable of distinguishing between reporting, spying and manipulating the public, since they regard all information as the monopoly of the state. Any independent information, especially critical information, is considered an attack on their authoritarian rule.

Seizing Gershkovich secured the Kremlin a hostage. But seizing a reporter for a major American publication also sent a signal to those foreign reporters who remain in Russia that real journalism under this regime is really dangerous, and not just for homegrown media, which has been thoroughly muzzled or driven into exile.

Putin came to power after the domestic and foreign press had thrown off the muzzles of the Soviet era, and he proceeded, especially since the invasion of Ukraine, to deliberately crush it. Many foreign journalists now try to report from outside Russia; Gershkovich tried valiantly to report from within and paid a heavy price.

So welcome home, Evan! Though we will regret the loss of your reporting from Russia. And welcome home, Alsu Kurmasheva, Vladimir Kara-Murza, Paul Whelan and all the others liberated from Russian detention. And profound thanks to the Biden administration, which doggedly pursued the exchange over months and years.

Yet even as we celebrate the liberation of these innocent people, it is hard to avoid the troubling fact that Putin has successfully used their detentions to get real criminals out of the prisons where they belong, most notably Vadim Krasikov, a Russian assassin serving a life sentence in Germany. Biden was right to do everything he could to bring back wrongfully imprisoned Americans, but the readiness of authoritarian states like Russia to seize innocent foreigners as hostages is galling. It’s why they are known as “abductor states” in Washington parlance.

With time, the details of how the complex exchange was arranged may come to light. One question that may never be answered is whether Putin calculated the pros and cons of concluding the exchange while Biden was still in office or waiting to see whether Donald Trump would be back to garner the garlands. Perhaps he concluded that with Trump’s changing political fortunes, such a complex deal was best done now.

Another question is why another American being held in Russia — Marc Fogel, a history teacher in a school for foreigners in Moscow — was not included in the exchange. Fogel was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony for carrying less than an ounce of marijuana, which he said he needed for medical purposes, but the State Department has never classified him as “wrongfully detained.” Why not?

Zeynep Tufekci

To Challenge Trump Directly, Give Him a Platform

When the National Association of Black Journalists announced that Donald Trump had agreed to a question-and-answer session at its annual conference, several members of the group criticized the event organizers for “platforming” the former president. Karen Attiah, a columnist at The Washington Post, even resigned her position as co-chair of the convention, saying she had not been involved in the decision “ to platform Trump in such a format.”

But inviting him was the right decision, and that was clear even before the tough-but-fair questions were asked during a highly informative session.

The idea of deplatforming, or refusing to extend a high-profile public forum to people with potentially harmful views , is not without merit. But it should not be seen as some universal response to all political figures people may find distasteful or all unpopular ideas.

It makes sense to deprive a platform to marginal or extremist figures who thrive on provocations to try to attract attention and stay relevant . Alex Jones, for example, who falsely portrayed the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as a government-crafted hoax, generally should not be handed opportunities to spread his malicious brand , even in combative settings.

And there was a time the concept may have been appropriate for Trump: in 2016, when he was able to suck up national attention on traditional and social media while being incorrectly treated as an entertainer and given a lot of time to express his views while not being properly challenged for them. Attention is a key resource in the 21st century, and Trump excels at dominating the national conversation, with skills honed from decades of grabbing publicity to enrich himself.

But as soon as Trump became president and, later, the Republican nominee for president again, the media lost the power to deplatform him. Like it or not, he could be president again, in part because of greater support among African American voters than other recent Republican candidates, and the idea that he could be deplatformed out of his advantageous position rather than challenged and exposed makes no sense. Trump is the one with the power here, and ignoring him just adds to it.

The N.A.B.J. journalists, who have invited many past presidents and candidates to their conventions, also invited Vice President Kamala Harris. I hope Harris accepts, too, and I expect moderators to be tough but fair with her, as well.

Most voters have made up their minds, but the few who will likely determine the fate of the country — so-called low-information swing voters — need to be pressed to make informed comparisons between the candidates. Neither avoiding Trump nor treating Harris with kid gloves would help provide that.

Jamelle Bouie

Trump Ventures Into the Real World, and Can’t Handle It

Trump can’t handle the real world, donald trump faced adversarial questioning, and he didn’t take it well..

Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Trump’s Plan for K-12 Schools Is Absolutely Bonkers

There’s been a lot of reporting this week about how Donald Trump is trying to distance himself from Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s proposal for a conservative takeover of the U.S. government. On K-12 education, Project 2025 suggests that “ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated” — a call echoed by the Republican Party’s 2024 platform . But while Trump’s own plans for education , which he published on his website and pushed out in a newsletter, don’t explicitly propose eliminating the Department of Education (though he has said before he would abolish it ), they might actually be more bananas and less pragmatic than Project 2025’s goals.

There’s nothing in Trump’s plans about test scores, STEM, school safety, work-force readiness or really anything that concerns most normal parents. It’s pure culture-war red meat about cutting “federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto our children” and ranting about “Marxists” and “pink-haired Communists teaching our kids.” Both the G.O.P. platform and Project 2025 contain panic about critical race theory, though they include fewer colorful references to pinkos.

But it’s also filled with bizarre promises that the executive branch doesn’t have the authority to fulfill, including a commitment to “implement the direct election of school principals by the parents.” This is a vow Trump has made before. Last year, Libby Stanford at Education Week asked : “Can he do that?”

The answer: “As president,” she wrote, “Trump would have little recourse to incentivize local communities to elect school principals and no ability to require it,” because neither the president nor Congress has the power to make local districts elect principals. The idea would be costly, unpopular and impractical to pull off. There is also no grass-roots support for it.

Trump also promises that he “will create a new credentialing body that will be the gold standard, anywhere in the world, to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children but very simply to educate them.” The teacher pipeline is already so busted — because of low pay, a lack of respect from their communities and the aforementioned culture war vitriol — that we don’t have enough teachers to go around. It’s absurd to think that a new credentialing system with a politically motivated “patriotic” litmus test would solve any problem.

Trump claims to want to put parents “back in charge and give them the final say.” If he really meant that, he would pay more attention to what parents say they want. In the words of an opinion essay from The 74 , an education website, “Forget Hot-Button Ed Issues — Voters Want Safe Schools and Kids Who Can Read.” It’s really that simple.

This Is What Happens When Black Women Challenge Trump

One reason Donald Trump may be afraid to debate Kamala Harris is that apparently all it takes to knock him off his game is a few tough questions from a Black woman.

This is exactly what happened in Trump’s 35-minute interview with three women journalists at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago on Wednesday. Clearly rattled by the audacity of Black women tossing him sharp questions, Trump let his facade crumble and slipped into the racist, misogynistic tropes of his native tongue.

“I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump said of Vice President Harris, who is Black and Indian American. “I respect either one, but she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went, she became a Black person. I think somebody should look into that.” This is false. Harris has always embraced her Blackness and even attended Howard University, a historically Black school.

The journalists at the event did the country a service. Much of that work was done by Rachel Scott of ABC News. Her first question was tough, factual and fair — a model of accountability journalism — and deserves to be repeated:

A lot of people did not think it was appropriate for you to be here today. You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States; that’s not true. You have told four congresswomen of color who are American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like “animal” and “rabid” to describe Black district attorneys. You’ve attacked Black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are stupid and racist. You’ve had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar-a-Lago resort. So my question, sir, now that you are asking Black supporters to vote for you: Why should Black voters trust you after you have used language like that?

Rather than answer the question, Trump launched a personal attack on Scott, calling her “rude” for doing her job. “First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a question in such a horrible manner,” he spat at Scott. “The first question. You don’t even say hello, ‘hello, how are you?’ Are you with ABC? Because I think they’re a fake news network, a terrible network.”

He then said he loves “the Black population” of this country — a curious term that sounds like it was drilled into him by a political consultant to replace his usual, “the Blacks.”He also declared himself to be the “best president for the Black population since Abraham Lincoln,” to which Scott quickly replied, “Better than President Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act?”

To win the White House in a razor-thin race, Trump lately has strained to do an impression of someone who likes Black people and respects women. The persistent problem with this strategy is that it doesn’t hold up to reality. When he is challenged, the depth of his animus tends to spill out in public and get in the way.

Pamela Paul

Melania Trump Speaks, Indirectly, and It Speaks Volumes

One of the world’s great mysteries is what really goes on inside Donald and Melania Trump’s marriage. For a very public couple, one whose infidelities have played out garishly in court, their relationship remains remarkably opaque, largely because of Melania’s determined silence and Donald’s pervasive mendacity. Thus, the burning questions: What did she think about the jury determination in 2023 that he had committed sexual assault against E. Jean Carroll? His romp with Stormy Daniels, a porn star, that led to his felony conviction for business fraud? His comments about women bleeding or, say, grabbing women by the “vagina”? Why does she stay?

Melania has remained eerily silent on such matters, which has led only to endless speculation about her beliefs. Every dismissive flick of her wrist has been analyzed. Each tiny permutation of her resting mew face. Her occasionally startling fashion choices. The anti-Trump public’s desire for a whiff of rebellion has been so palpable, it’s tempting to believe that she was secretly on board with his felony convictions , as “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” suggested .

Of course, what happens inside any marriage is a mystery. Political marriages , whether it’s Hillary and Bill , JD and Usha , JFK and Jackie , Barack and Michelle are a constant fascination because we necessarily remain outside of them.

But Donald Trump just offered some unintentionally sad insight into how Melania really feels. In an interview last night on Fox News, in which Trump talked at length about the assassination attempt (yes, he told the story again ), Laura Ingraham asked, “What was Melania’s reaction, if you don’t mind my asking. I know this is very personal, when she learned about what happened on that field in Butler?”

“I asked her that,” Trump told Ingraham. “I said, ‘So what was your feeling?’” He went on to say that Melania can’t really talk about it. But then came a very uncharacteristic moment for Trump. He leaned far forward, exhaled abruptly and said in a rush of words, interspersed with nervous laughter:

“Which is OK because that means she likes me. Or she loves me. I mean, let’s say she could talk about it freely that wouldn’t be … I’m not so sure which is better. But, uh, she either likes or loves me and that’s nice.”

This may have been the most revelatory statement Donald Trump has made about himself or about Melania. He says she either likes him or she loves him. He’s not sure, but surprisingly and jarringly, he seemed to care. Who knew?

Jeneen Interlandi

Arrests of Drug Kingpins Won’t Solve the Addiction Crisis

It was a plot twist made for Netflix. Ismael Zambada García, a founder of the notorious Sinaloa drug cartel , was tricked ( or forced — the details are still muddy) onto a plane in Mexico and brought to the United States to face drug conspiracy charges — and hopefully justice. He had evaded capture for decades and had a $15 million U.S. bounty on his head.

Zambada García was brought in not by U.S. or Mexican authorities but by his own godson and fellow drug trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán López (son of the infamous El Chapo ), who surrendered himself to authorities upon landing.

In the short term, the arrests could produce more violence and instability in Mexican communities that have already seen far too much of both, as rivals of every sort jockey to fill the void left by the newly captured.

They could also shake up already strained relations between the United States and Mexico, especially if Zambada García decides to offer up whatever dirty laundry he has on leaders there in exchange for some kind of leniency here.

What the arrests will not do, if history is any lesson, is stem the flow of illicit drugs out of Mexico or into the United States.

The United States invested billions of dollars in a sustained effort to stop the flow of cocaine out of Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s. Among other things, that effort helped bring about the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993 and led eventually to the waning of the notorious Colombia cartel, which was responsible for a vast majority of the global cocaine trade. Today, cocaine production is soaring, not only in Mexico (where experts say U.S. efforts in Colombia led directly to the rise of the Sinaloa kingpins) but in Colombia , too, in some of the same regions that the United States targeted so diligently for so long.

Pursuing and punishing drug traffickers is both necessary and worthwhile. These are bad people who have done terrible things. They have destroyed countless lives, both through the trafficking of fentanyl (now a leading cause of overdose deaths among American adults) and through the extreme violence that they have all made such common use of.

But arrests of drug kingpins are not the key to solving the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis. For that, we need to look within our own borders — at things like treatment , prevention and harm reduction .

Israel Can Still Avoid Regional War and Pursue a Cease-Fire

One of the great risks for the world in the latter half of this year is a wider war in the Middle East involving Iran, Lebanon and Israel. That possibility has just become more likely.

None of the parties want such a war. But each feels obliged to respond to strikes by the other in a way that ratchets up conflict and risks miscalculation and a cycle of escalation.

Today’s crisis results from what appear to be the assassinations just hours apart of Fuad Shukr, a senior member of the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, and Ismail Haniyeh, a top Hamas leader who was visiting Iran. Israel claimed responsibility for killing Shukr, although his death was not confirmed, and Israeli agents were widely presumed to be responsible for the killing of Haniyeh.

For all the danger in the coming days and weeks, there is an offramp. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel could use the double assassinations to proclaim victory and then agree to a cease-fire in Gaza. Such a deal, assuming it is still achievable, would end the slaughter in Gaza, bring some hostages home and offer a path to de-escalate the conflict in Israel’s north with Hezbollah, allowing Israelis to return to their homes near the Lebanon border.

“The best way to bring the temperature down everywhere is through the cease-fire in Gaza,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, and he’s exactly right.

But first, prepare for a Lebanese and an Iranian response to the assassinations.

Some Israelis are celebrating the killing of Haniyeh, and it’s certainly preferable to target leaders of Hamas rather than to level entire civilian neighborhoods in Gaza. But I doubt that killing Haniyeh does anything for Israel’s security. He had a reputation for being a bit more open to deals than other Hamas leaders, and he may be replaced by someone like Khaled Mashal, who approved of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack. Israel had already tried to assassinate Mashal back in 1997.

Israel feels that it has to re-establish deterrence after the Oct. 7 attacks, and Iran likewise feels it must re-establish deterrence when it suffers an assassination on its soil. The upshot is that some counter-strike on Israel by Iran or its proxies is likely soon. If we’re lucky, it won’t cause many casualties and perhaps negotiations on a cease-fire can resume; if a school or other civilian site happens to be hit, then we may see more escalation and find ourselves not on a path to a cease-fire but to a wider war.

Such a war would be devastating, far more so than the Oct. 7 attack. Hezbollah is well armed and barrages of its rockets could cause countless casualties in Israel, while Israel could in turn devastate Lebanon.

Iran, along with the Houthis in Yemen, while farther away, could add to the strikes on Israel. There could well be disruptions to oil production and to the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, raising global oil prices significantly. That would probably hurt Kamala Harris’s electoral prospects while helping President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

So let’s hope Netanyahu seizes the opportunity to declare victory and at long last fully embraces a cease-fire. But, sadly, I wouldn’t bet on it. Brace yourself.

Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist, reporting from Atlanta

In Atlanta, Harris Has Dance-Party Energy

The first person I met in the long line for Kamala Harris’s rally in Atlanta on Tuesday was Tomorrow Wright, a pre-K teacher who hadn’t been planning to vote when Joe Biden was still the Democratic candidate.

“Biden and Trump, I wasn’t with neither one of them,” she said, adding that Biden had disappointed her by not doing more to cancel student loan debt. But Harris had electrified her, and she’d queued at noon for a rally — her first ever — that wouldn’t start until evening, shading herself from the brutal southern sun under a pink umbrella.

Most of the other people I met at the Georgia State Convocation Center, where around 10,000 people packed the stadium for Harris, said they’d intended to vote for Biden. But with the energy on the ground moribund, many told me they couldn’t rouse themselves to do much more for him, like go to events or volunteer.

“I’ve campaigned since ’08, and I couldn’t go campaign,” said Tammy Clabby, a longtime Democratic activist who worked for Hillary Clinton in 2016. “How could I tell a young person to vote for Joe Biden when he couldn’t finish a sentence in that debate?” Harris’s ascension, however, changed everything. Clabby compared the vibe to Barack Obama’s first electrifying run.

It was an analogy I heard over and over at the ebullient rally, which often felt like a dance party, and not just when the Grammy-winning rapper Megan Thee Stallion was performing. All the Democrats’ fervent yearning for a fighter to take on Trump, their desperate hope for hope, has converged on a woman who until just weeks ago was regularly overlooked and underestimated.

Some conservatives, seeming discombobulated by their sudden change in political fortunes, appear to think that the explosion of Democratic enthusiasm for Kamala Harris is a media psy-op.

“Is it possible to completely manufacture a cultural phenomenon by taking a vapid, leftist San Francisco Democrat and turning her into something that she’s not through nonstop gaslighting?” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida wrote on social media.

They should keep telling themselves that.

Are Israel and Hezbollah Headed for a Dangerous Escalation?

A rocket lands on a playing field on the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, killing 12 children and teenagers. Israel vows a “severe” response, and the United States and other Western leaders urge restraint. The response comes on Tuesday: a strike on a dense residential neighborhood in southern Beirut, which Israel says was targeted against the Hezbollah commander responsible for the rocket attack. The suspense is tangible: Is this it?

Is this the next war that has been a threat to Israel and its neighbors through all the nine months of the conflict with Hamas? A war that would be far deadlier than the one in Gaza, with the Israeli Defense Force pitted against the most heavily armed militia in the Middle East, one wielding a vast arsenal of attack drones, rockets and missiles far greater and more sophisticated than anything Hamas has?

This may not be the moment. Hezbollah, the political party and militia that controls southern Lebanon, has denied that Saturday’s attack was its doing, though that may be intended more to deny responsibility for killing members of the Druse community, a small offshoot of Shia Islam who have lived on the Golan Heights since before Israel seized the area 57 years ago, and who have tried to stay clear of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Neither Israel nor the United States doubt that Hezbollah was responsible, especially given that tit-for-tat rocket attacks have been constant since the Gaza war erupted last Oct. 7. Saturday’s missile was most likely intended for a nearby Israeli base, not the Druse youngsters. Still, a strike on a non-Jewish community in Israel also put pressure on Israel to show that it cares about the security of all its citizens. In the Middle East, nothing is ever simple or binary.

The intended target on Tuesday, Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah official, was killed in the attack , according to the Israeli military, and there were reports that 35 people were wounded.

It’s not clear whether Israel’s strike on Beirut, if the response ends there for now, will provoke Hezbollah to escalate the duel. But even if none of the actors involved want an all-out war at this juncture, the conditions for one to erupt will remain. Hezbollah has vowed to continue popping rockets into northern Israel so long as the fighting continues in Gaza, leading to retaliatory Israeli strikes and to the evacuation of thousands of residents from both sides of the border — 60,000 Israelis and a far greater number of Lebanese.

According to Amos Harel, a defense analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, writing recently in Foreign Affairs (before the latest exchange), there is a strong longing in Israel to deal with Hezbollah “once and for all.” And in the north, Harel wrote, Israel is far better prepared for a major clash than it was in the south. In the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7, when confusion reigned along the Gaza border, three Israeli divisions were rapidly deployed to preclude Hezbollah from opening a second front.

For President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, whose reaction to a dangerous crisis will be closely scrutinized now that she is the probable Democratic candidate for president, preventing a dangerous new war, one that would reverberate across the Middle East, is a critical challenge.

Farah Stockman

It’s Not Too Late for Change in Venezuela

The Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro wants the world to believe he won Sunday’s presidential election . But nobody should believe that until he releases precinct-level vote tallies and submits to an independent audit. That authorities have failed so far to do that “tells you everything you need to know about the election,” Geoff Ramsey, a specialist on Latin America at the Atlantic Council, told me.

Maduro has done everything in his power to tilt the election in his favor, from barring rivals to arresting their campaign staff members. But even that doesn’t seem to have been enough. Now he appears to be faking the numbers and declaring victory. It’s already being called the “ mother of all stolen elections .”

Luckily, the Venezuelan opposition anticipated that Maduro would try to rig the vote, and dispatched volunteers to collect precinct-level tally sheets from voting centers across the country. The opposition says it has collected some 70 percent of such tally sheets , enough data to prove that voters overwhelmingly rejected Maduro.

And why wouldn’t they vote him out? He has presided over the worst economic collapse of any country not at war . Since 2014, the country’s economy shrank by roughly three-quarters , and about 20 percent of citizens have left, thanks to Maduro’s corruption, mismanagement of the oil industry, and U.S. sanctions brought on by his policies. Who would vote for six more years of that?

Every country in the region has suffered from Venezuela’s collapse and would benefit from its recovery. Leaders around the world — and those who prop up the Maduro regime — should ask themselves how much more Venezuela can take and insist that Maduro come clean with the precinct-level results.

“There is a lot of consensus even among governments that have been traditionally friendly to Maduro —Mexico, Brazil, Colombia — that there has to be transparency around the results,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist at the University of Denver, told me.

This is far from the first time that Maduro has been accused of rigging the vote. But the ability of the opposition to collect such compelling proof of it is a testament of the incredible bravery and surprising unity of the opposition under the leadership of Venezuela’s “Iron Lady,” María Corina Machado , an opposition front-runner who was barred from running.

Undaunted, Machado rallied behind Edmundo González Urrutia, a little-known former diplomat who was allowed on the ballot. Exit polls and opinion surveys suggest that he won in a landslide. Anger at Maduro’s attempts to claim victory has led to mass protests and even the toppling of a statue of Hugo Chávez . The Venezuelan people deserve better, and they know it.

Frank Bruni

Contributing Opinion Writer

Trump vs. ‘America’s Border Czar’

“Border czar.”

If Donald Trump and his campaign staff could tattoo that epithet onto Kamala Harris’s forehead or dress her in a sandwich board bearing only that phrase, they would. So it’s not surprising to encounter it at the start of the first major ad that the Trump campaign has released since Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee.

“This is America’s border czar,” says an unseen narrator, in an ominous voice, as the words “Border Czar Kamala Harris” appear onscreen, just to hammer home the designation. They’re superimposed over video of Harris, in a kaleidoscopic blouse, dancing at an unspecified celebration. Message: She’s not just out to lunch. She’s out having a blast while the country implodes.

On a scale of 1 to someone screaming that Harris is an agent of the apocalypse, the ad rates about a 9. It’s as subtle as Trump. And like him, it doesn’t play fair — in tying illegal border crossings to terrorism and in assigning her ultimate responsibility for those crossings. She was charged not with fortifying the border but with the vaguer task of working with Central American countries to deter migration by identifying and alleviating its causes.

But the ad is smart, and it’s a clear signal of what will be a main theme, possibly the main theme, in Republicans’ attacks against Harris in particular and Democrats in general. Americans are much more concerned about illegal immigration than they were in the past, and polls show that they trust Trump more than they do Democrats to hold back the tide.

That’s a big reason that Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona is on Harris’s short list of potential running mates: He represents a border state and has spoken forcefully for greater border security. Harris must persuade voters that she’s concerned about and focused on that issue.

But Trump must take care, too. The ad — which is scheduled to appear in the six top battleground states — underscores that. The colors in Harris’s blouse, the lightheartedness of her dance moves, a carefully selected snippet of remarks she made to Lester Holt of NBC News: Those details and others combine to suggest that Harris is frivolous, different, even other, especially because there’s an image of Trump in the ad, too, and he’s striding purposefully in a suit and red tie outside what appears to be the White House.

Serious man. Silly (and dangerous) woman. That’s the contrast being drawn, and it could turn off many voters.

David Firestone

Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board

Biden Is Right: End Lifetime Tenure on the Supreme Court

House Speaker Mike Johnson was probably right to describe President Biden’s Supreme Court reform proposals as “dead on arrival” in his chamber, but that’s just because Republicans don’t want anything to interfere with their 6-to-3 supermajority on the court. It wasn’t that long ago that many Republicans fully supported the most compelling of Biden’s ideas: term limits for justices.

In 2012, before he was a Republican senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley wrote an article saying that if justices knew they would not serve on the court for life, it would “foster a more circumspect attitude toward the court’s role.” The independence created by life terms, he wrote, breeds “an overconfidence in the justices’ capacity to get constitutional questions right.” (And he was in a position to know, as a former clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts.) Term limits were also supported by Senator Marco Rubio , and Senator Ted Cruz proposed putting justices up for election every eight years.

Now it’s Democrats who want to end lifetime appointments, having seen the six justices in the supermajority trample individual rights and do nothing about shameful ethical abuses within their ranks. But an 18-year maximum tenure for justices, as Biden and many others have proposed, shouldn’t be ping-ponged around by whatever faction is dissatisfied with the current court. It’s a good idea born of a mistake by the Constitution’s drafters, who weren’t able to foresee the problems caused by lifetime appointments.

For one thing, life spans were shorter then. Through the 1960s, the average term on the court was around 15 years; after 1970, it became about 26 years. The founders did not fully anticipate how a justice might become insulated from reality after serving on the court for many decades. They didn’t anticipate the potential for arrogance and corruption, as long-serving justices — like Clarence Thomas — would take lavish gifts from special interests without the possibility of penalty.

And they didn’t anticipate that a president like Donald Trump would outsource his appointment power to fierce ideological warrior groups like the Federalist Society, who scour law schools for the most conservative students, get them clerkships and then promote them at a young age for judicial openings, in hopes of keeping them on the bench for more than a quarter-century.

The United States remains the only major constitutional democracy without either term limits or a mandatory retirement age for judges on the highest court. Almost every American state, in fact, has some kind of term limit for high-court justices. Only Rhode Island has neither a term limit nor an age restriction.

Johnson says the system has worked fine for centuries, but it clearly has not. The time for change is long overdue. Biden deserves credit as the first president to join the call for an overhaul.

The Tradwife Life Is Nothing New

Hannah Neeleman , whose nom de internet is Ballerina Farm, was described as “the queen of the tradwives,” by Megan Agnew of The Times of London this month. Neeleman previously claimed to be “unfamiliar with the term,” which describes social media influencers who often promote traditional gender roles and present idealized domestic scenes.

I believe tradwives when they say they are happy living this way. But getting behind the images of Ballerina Farm confirmed what I already suspected: Being a tradwife is not appealing or aspirational for many modern women, despite how beautiful it looks in photographs.

Neeleman is an ex-Juilliard ballerina who is married to an heir to the JetBlue fortune, and the two live on a farm in Utah with their “8 littles” as she puts it in her Instagram bio . Ballerina Farm’s brand of tradwifery might best be described as internet pastoral: home-schooling children, making croissants, drinking turmeric lattes made from raw milk from the farm. The profile asks: Does Neeleman’s lifestyle represent “an empowering new model of womanhood — or a hammer blow for feminism?”

I would argue that all she represents is an old model of wealthy white womanhood, disseminated by new technology. This model valorizes the performance of motherhood if you act joyful all the time, are buoyed by an ocean of family money and can compete in a beauty pageant two weeks postpartum, as Neeleman did. But it has no material support for the human beings who have more complex feelings than a perfect facade allows.

Pitting tradwives against feminists is a trap . That makes it seem that feminists don’t care about families or hate stay-at-home parents or big families, which is false. Many feminists are stay-at-home parents, but tradwives are a separate category who tend to believe in cultural values like submitting to one’s husband.

Neeleman certainly defers to her husband, Daniel, about basically every major life decision she has made since they met in their early 20s. As Agnew notes: “Daniel wanted to live in the great Western wilds, so they did; he wanted to farm, so they do; he likes date nights once a week, so they go (they have a babysitter on those evenings); he didn’t want nannies in the house, so there aren’t any.”

Hannah Neeleman’s version of womanhood represents an age-old glorification of maternal suffering. Her family has the money to employ nannies and many people to do other household tasks, but she must go without additional child care because her husband doesn’t want her to have it. She sometimes falls so ill from exhaustion that she can’t get out of bed for a week.

While her social media feed makes her suffering appear glamorous, if you take off the pageant sequins, all that’s left is a vulnerable person, worn into the ground.

Thomas L. Friedman

Democrats Could Regret Calling Trump and His Supporters ‘Weird’

For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are “weird.”

I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters “weird.”

But weird seems to be the word of the week. As this newspaper reported, in a potential audition to be Harris’s running mate , Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said over the weekend of Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio: “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” Just to make sure he got the point across, Walz added: “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

As The Times reported, Harris, speaking at a weekend campaign event at a theater in the Berkshires, “leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the men had taken against her were ‘just plain weird.’” The Times added: “Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Mr. Trump was getting ‘older and stranger’ while Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, called Mr. Vance ‘weird’ and ‘erratic.’”

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

“It is not only a flight from substance,” noted Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, the author of “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” “It allows Trump to tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize them and view them as ‘outsiders’ — people who are ‘weird.’ It plays right into Trump’s appeal to his followers that he is taking the slings and arrows of elites for them. It is a distraction from the big argument that Democrats should be running on: How we can renew the dignity of work and the dignity of working men and women.”

I don’t know what is sufficient for Harris to win, but I sure know what is necessary: a message that is dignity affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity destroying. If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one beats Trump in that arena.

Jonathan Alter

Harris Should Pick Walz, and Then Put Shapiro and Kelly to Work

While Kamala Harris could easily make a surprise pick, I’m assuming the accuracy of reports that the short list consists of Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.

My suggestion is that for the next 100 days, she should effectively choose all three.

At first glance, Kelly or Shapiro might seem to help more by joining the ticket. While Harris is now comfortably ahead in Minnesota, she’s behind or dead even in Arizona and Pennsylvania polls.

But this assessment doesn’t take into account what the V.P. nominee will actually do in the 14 weeks before the election: Lambaste Donald Trump, spearhead fund-raisers in big cities, back Democratic Senate candidates in close races and campaign in battleground states when Harris is elsewhere.

That’s not the best use of Kelly’s and Shapiro’s time. Kelly’s priority should be to help nail down Arizona, where he has great credibility on the border issue that threatens Harris. Likewise, Shapiro should stay put in Pennsylvania. By helping Harris reposition herself on fracking, Shapiro, who is surprisingly popular in rural Pennsylvania, can cut Trump’s margins there and help Democrats carry the state. And by not putting Shapiro on the ticket, Harris avoids splits in the party over the war in Gaza.

If Harris visits both Arizona and Pennsylvania once a week for two or three events, as she should, that’s a whopping 28 to 42 joint appearances in each state with these popular figures.

Walz, meanwhile, would spread his nimble Midwestern charm as the actual V.P. nominee. He has a résumé that looks as if it was designed in a lab: raised in a Nebraska town of 400; geography teacher and coach of football state champions; 24 years as a noncommissioned officer of the Army National Guard; moderate Democratic House member from a deeply red Minnesota district; highly effective governor with crowd-pleasing wins on cannabis, paid family leave and mandatory gun background checks, among others. He connects culturally in rural America, which would provide critical balance on a ticket headed by a member of the coastal cultural elite.

Walz last week launched the creative “they’re weird” talking point about the Trump/Vance ticket, now taken up by the whole Democratic Party, and there’s more where that came from. Vice-presidential nominees are meant to be attack dogs, a role that political consultants in Arizona and Pennsylvania say neither Kelly nor Shapiro is especially well equipped to play. Walz is already embracing that task with relish, a happy warrior who stays light and upbeat on TV.

Selecting Kelly, Shapiro or Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina would reassure moderate voters — a critical task for Harris as she faces a fierce assault for being too liberal. But there are other options for doing so. One good way to start: Harris should announce that Mitt Romney will be her secretary of defense or homeland security.

Patrick Healy

Deputy Opinion Editor

The Important Unanswered Question About Kamala Harris

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

For all the Democratic defections from President Biden and euphoria over Vice President Kamala Harris, there’s an important unanswered question about whether Harris can do something that Biden got very, very right in 2020: Be appealing to independent, undecided and swing voters with a centrist message emphasizing normalcy and uniting the country.

I think that message won Biden victory in the Electoral College. And a lot of Democrats are telling me two things right now: Harris will win the popular vote in November (thanks to strong margins in blue states), but it’s far from clear if she will win the Electoral College vote. She’s got to prove herself to those independent, undecided and swing voters in battleground states, or else she’s not going to win the presidency. And for all the record fund-raising and meme excitement, Harris hasn’t started indicating how she plans to do so.

Blue America is undoubtedly fired up and closing the enthusiasm gap fast against Donald Trump, and that’s a big deal — it’s what Democrats needed to do in Week 1 of the 15-week Harris presidential sprint. As we enter Week 2, I’ll be watching today for signs of a swing-voter message from two star governors and possible Harris running mates — Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan — who are jointly campaigning for Harris in the Philadelphia suburbs. And I’ll be keeping an eye on new Harris campaign ads and her next big event, in Atlanta on Tuesday.

So far, Harris has mostly been talking to friendly Democratic audiences. She is leaving it to surrogates to make her case in more challenging venues, as Pete Buttigieg did Sunday on Fox News , or speak most pointedly to swing voters and small-town Americans in purple and red areas, as Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has.

Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton won the presidency because they made real attempts — through policy ideas, speeches, campaign travel and, sometimes, criticism of their party or allies — to show that they had a measure of independence, thought for themselves and, yes, were looking out for all Americans, not just team blue. Both Bushes broke with some in the G.O.P. too (most notably on taxes and then immigration). Now that Harris has fired up the base faster than perhaps even she expected, what will she do to go beyond that base?

I’m really curious about what she says at her Atlanta event and where she plans to campaign in the days and weeks to come. And I’m also curious to see if she can really put Trump on the defensive over debating her ; she could reach a lot of those swing voters through debates, as well as prosecuting the case that Trump is unfit to lead the country again. Making a serious proposal to Trump that they meet for one debate a week starting in September would take this historic election to a new level.