How to Deal with Difficult Topics for Persuasive Essays

The writing of any type of essay can be difficult if you don't have a knowledge of the structure of essays, an excellent selection for your topic and unless you carry out proper research. The nature of a persuasive essay means you have to persuade the reader that your point of view is correct. This is one of the factors which differentiate a persuasive essay from many other types of essay. Your personal opinion is important. One of the best ways to get your personal opinion across is to quote somebody else's, a contrary opinion to your own.

But there will come a time when you are asked to write a persuasive essay and the topic will be difficult. Now what makes a topic difficult when it comes to a persuasive essay? It can be a number of things.

• It can be a controversial topic and one which inflames people's emotions.
• It can be an excellent topic but one which does not have a great deal of research material available.
• It can be a seriously large topic and your word count may not do it justice.

So how do you overcome the problem of a difficult topic?

You could change your selection topic. Even if it means not writing about a topic in which you have prior knowledge, a great interest or passion and even a desire to study in more detail in the future. If you believe that your opinion in writing on a difficult topic in a persuasive essay will be offensive or has the potential to be offensive to the reader then perhaps one way of overcoming this problem is to simply change topics.

Now you might find what you believe is a brilliant topic for a persuasive essay but the topic becomes difficult because you don't have access to all the relevant research material. Remember you will create a persuasive essay depending very much on the information you have at your fingertips. If you can't find that information or if you know it's there but can't access it easily, then again you are going to have your work cut out in writing about that difficult topic.

And finally one issue which often causes problems for students writing a persuasive essay is that they don't have too narrow a topic. The topic becomes difficult because it is too broad. You cannot possibly do justice to your thesis statement because there is simply so much material to be included. And again the solution to this situation is not so much to abandon the topic but rather to rewrite it so that you concentrate or focus on a single aspect of the topic.