I have posted about persuasive writing (opinion) before,
Persuasive Writing Goodies For The New Year, but this year I
became more thoughtful about what a strong opinion piece looks
like. The common core standard for opinion writing states,
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.1.1 Write opinion pieces in which they
introduce the topic or name the book they are writing about,
state an opinion, supply a reason for the opinion, and provide
some sense of closure. I really felt that the beginning of the
unit opinion pieces from my students lack the writer's voice
that their informational and narrative pieces had. When I looked
at the standard again I realized that introducing the topic and
providing and sense of closure were areas we could improve. We
started with grabbing the reader's attention. We look to authors
for ideas from the following books: Here is our chart we
created... After reading the author's introductions we studied
them and labeled them with the strategy the author used. We
found that authors Introduce self or top