Touchstone 1.2: Outline a Persuasive Proposal
ASSIGNMENT: In your personal, academic, and professional life, you will encounter countless situations where you will need to convince family members, friends, coworkers, committees, and other audiences to adopt new policies, consider different processes and perspectives, or make changes that will impact others. Being able to convince others will allow you to have a voice in your own life and impact the lives of others. In order to do this, you will need to develop strategies for persuasion. You will be more convincing if you are able to provide credible evidence to support your point. Having valid and credible evidence to support your arguments plays a large role in how persuasive you are, how others receive your information, and the credibility you can build for yourself.
Following the Assignment Guidelines below, choose an argumentative topic to research. This will be your topic throughout the rest of this course, so the activities required for this assignment will provide the foundation for your future Touchstones. The topic for an argumentative research paper must be an arguable topic, meaning that it involves conflicting viewpoints. Additionally, it cannot be a topic that is already decided or agreed upon by most of society. You must state a clear position on the topic, and argue in favor of that position using logic and evidence. A good test of whether or not a position is an appropriate, arguable position is to ask yourself if a reasonable person would disagree. If not, the position is probably not an appropriately arguable position for this paper.
Scenario 2: Workplace
Workplace-focused problems involve issues or needs that affect employees at the office, department, or company. Some examples of workplace issues might include poor communication between departments, wasteful spending, lack of work-life balance, or a desire to have on-site childcare. The goal of this scenario is to analyze the problem, and then develop a solution that you think will resolve or improve the situation for the employees. How will you convince management to accept your solution?
If you are wondering which scenario would be best to choose, think about concerns, issues, or projects that you are passionate about in your own life and career. For example, as you think of this, if you keep coming back to how the empty lot on your block would make a great community garden space, you may want to consider choosing Scenario 1. If, on the other hand, your workplace is experiencing a delay in receiving supplies, and you want to explore a solution to this problem,
Possible research question stems:
How will _____ benefit our workplace?
What steps will we need to implement _____ in the community?
What are the costs associated with _____?