One of the most valuable skills you can have is the ability to persuade, convince and change someone’s mind. This is exactly what we learned in this project “change my mind”. A very fitting name. During our learning, we read and analyzed different ways to write persuasively, and got to experiment with writing to an audience of our choice.

One of the most interesting parts of this project for me was learning that there are many different ways to write persuasively. Just like in physics there are different formulas for different situations, and there were different writing styles for different people or subjects. One of the key things was figuring out what you needed to play on to persuade your specific audience.

Uses your emotions to try and persuade you.

One of the examples we looked at for this was a piece of writing about how young adults’ brains weren’t fully developed. The author could have shown scientific papers, facts and statistics to try and convince them they were right. Instead, they told the heartbreaking stories of young people who had their lives ruined because they were treated as fully functioning adults. By playing on our emotions instead of our reasoning or logic the author thought they would have a better chance of changing the mind of their audience.

Statistics of Adolescent Capital punishment

After getting a sense of the kind of writing I could do I had to choose a topic. As I’m in grade 11 I was starting to think about what I wanted to do after high school. Of course, a university is an option but I was also interested in a few other options for my post-secondary. This made me decide to write about why university isn’t the best option for everyone after high school. To narrow this topic even further I was going to write the reasons why university isn’t the best option for me after high school with my target audience being my mom.

The first thing I did was look at what my audience needed to see to be persuaded. Luckily I know my audience very well. My Mom wouldn’t be convinced just by one emotional pitch about why I didn’t want to go to university and how happy I would be. At the same time, she also wouldn’t be convinced by a very impersonal set of facts. Knowing this I tried to balance statistics with emotion in a perfect ratio designed just for her. I also decided that my piece of writing would directly compare and contrast university with other options. The statistics I had found were very powerful so I thought that comparing and contrasting them would give me a strong foundation for my emotional piece of the argument.

 

April 25, 2022. Owen Cree. These days schools seem to only have one job. Everyone is eager and willing to face the academic challenges of university if they can afford/qualify for it. Learning is dropped behind grades in importance. You're probably thinking that it makes sense to go to university because most successful people you know went there. As we come towards 2022 though, there is increasingly more evidence that university may not be the best choice. Before you tell me I’m crazy, let me prove to you that university is not the best option for my future. Going to university has many benefits, luckily the trades and other options like becoming an entrepreneur, firefighter or police officer also offer these benefits. One of the most common beliefs about going to university is that you will make more money. At the end of the day, money is all-important in today's society so it is a genuine priority. Although it is true that on average university graduates can make 10-30% more than trade workers in some fields, there are hidden costs to a university that you don’t see. Trades school is much more affordable and shorter than a university degree. This means that although you are making less money on average, you will have more years of paid work and more years to receive a raise or promotion. University costs on average more than 169% than it did in the 1980s. This has caused a huge increase in student loans. Canadian student debt is 18 billion dollars and the average student owes 26,000 dollars. With interest this will take a cut out of how much more university students are expected to make. University is often said to be the only way to live a fulfilled life because it is associated with higher-level jobs. In reality, my dad has more than three university degrees and still openly wishes he had taken a different path after high school. Becoming a skilled tradesperson can be extremely rewarding as some of the work you do may be challenging. Not to mention how rewarding a job like being a firefighter or police officer could be. Your job is to save lives. In my case becoming a firefighter has been an interest of mine ever since I met Steve Vanderhoek. He is a professional mountain bike rider as well as a professional firefighter. By being a firefighter he can afford to live in Vancouver and with his time off he has become one of the most talented riders in the world. Let me restate, he is a professional mountain biker who is also saving people's lives and homes at work. To me, the life of a fighter appeals to who I think I am. I love having time to pursue my passions like mountain biking and skiing, but I also want to feel like the work I do has meaning. In conclusion, university has benefits and everybody knows that. In the 21st century it seems like everybody has forgotten that it also has competition from the trades or other high-level career paths. Trades and other post-secondary options being more affordable, involving a ton of skill and focus and offering some of the most rewarding work are all reasons why I think university may not be the best option for me.

 

After writing, editing and some peer feedback I was ready to get her opinion. My mom said that she found the statistics were a good start to the paper because of how definitive they were in supporting my opinion. She said that my personal story was good but could have been more detailed to further persuade her. Her biggest piece of feedback for my writing was the introduction. She found it unclear and lacking flow. Although there was no information important to my argument in the introduction, it is what sets up your audience. This means that if I made it more clear I could expect better results when trying to reach an even broader audience who may be making up their mind after the first paragraph.

if I could go back and change one thing I did during this project it would be showing my work to a larger and more carrying audience. Something like social media where I could see how different audiences reacted to my writing choices.

Twitter would be perfect because of how many people I could easily reach.

In conclusion, this was an excellent project. For how short it was I feel like my writing skills and knowledge improved a lot. Trying to tailor a piece of writing to a specific audience is challenging and something that I found myself enjoying much more than other writing I have done this year. I hope that in future projects we will have more opportunities to try and target specific audiences with our writing.