how to write a formal persuasive essay

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How to Write a Persuasive Essay: Tips and Tricks

Allison Bressmer

Most composition classes you’ll take will teach the art of persuasive writing. That’s a good thing.

Knowing where you stand on issues and knowing how to argue for or against something is a skill that will serve you well both inside and outside of the classroom.

Persuasion is the art of using logic to prompt audiences to change their mind or take action , and is generally seen as accomplishing that goal by appealing to emotions and feelings.

A persuasive essay is one that attempts to get a reader to agree with your perspective.

Ready for some tips on how to produce a well-written, well-rounded, well-structured persuasive essay? Just say yes. I don’t want to have to write another essay to convince you!

How Do I Write a Persuasive Essay?

What are some good topics for a persuasive essay, how do i identify an audience for my persuasive essay, how do you create an effective persuasive essay, how should i edit my persuasive essay.

Your persuasive essay needs to have the three components required of any essay: the introduction , body , and conclusion .

That is essay structure. However, there is flexibility in that structure.

There is no rule (unless the assignment has specific rules) for how many paragraphs any of those sections need.

Although the components should be proportional; the body paragraphs will comprise most of your persuasive essay.

How Do I Start a Persuasive Essay?

As with any essay introduction, this paragraph is where you grab your audience’s attention, provide context for the topic of discussion, and present your thesis statement.

TIP 1: Some writers find it easier to write their introductions last. As long as you have your working thesis, this is a perfectly acceptable approach. From that thesis, you can plan your body paragraphs and then go back and write your introduction.

TIP 2: Avoid “announcing” your thesis. Don’t include statements like this:

• “In my essay I will show why extinct animals should (not) be regenerated.”
• “The purpose of my essay is to argue that extinct animals should (not) be regenerated.”

Announcements take away from the originality, authority, and sophistication of your writing.

Instead, write a convincing thesis statement that answers the question "so what?" Why is the topic important, what do you think about it, and why do you think that? Be specific.

How Many Paragraphs Should a Persuasive Essay Have?

This body of your persuasive essay is the section in which you develop the arguments that support your thesis. Consider these questions as you plan this section of your essay:

• What arguments support your thesis?
• What is the best order for your arguments?
• What evidence do you have?
• Will you address the opposing argument to your own?
• How can you conclude convincingly?

TIP: Brainstorm and do your research before you decide which arguments you’ll focus on in your discussion. Make a list of possibilities and go with the ones that are strongest, that you can discuss with the most confidence, and that help you balance your rhetorical triangle .

What Should I Put in the Conclusion of a Persuasive Essay?

The conclusion is your “mic-drop” moment. Think about how you can leave your audience with a strong final comment.

And while a conclusion often re-emphasizes the main points of a discussion, it shouldn’t simply repeat them.

TIP 1: Be careful not to introduce a new argument in the conclusion—there’s no time to develop it now that you’ve reached the end of your discussion!

TIP 2 : As with your thesis, avoid announcing your conclusion. Don’t start your conclusion with “in conclusion” or “to conclude” or “to end my essay” type statements. Your audience should be able to see that you are bringing the discussion to a close without those overused, less sophisticated signals.

If your instructor has assigned you a topic, then you’ve already got your issue; you’ll just have to determine where you stand on the issue. Where you stand on your topic is your position on that topic.

Your position will ultimately become the thesis of your persuasive essay: the statement the rest of the essay argues for and supports, intending to convince your audience to consider your point of view.

If you have to choose your own topic, use these guidelines to help you make your selection:

• Choose an issue you truly care about
• Choose an issue that is actually debatable

Simple “tastes” (likes and dislikes) can’t really be argued. No matter how many ways someone tries to convince me that milk chocolate rules, I just won’t agree.

It’s dark chocolate or nothing as far as my tastes are concerned.

Similarly, you can’t convince a person to “like” one film more than another in an essay.

You could argue that one movie has superior qualities than another: cinematography, acting, directing, etc. but you can’t convince a person that the film really appeals to them.

Once you’ve selected your issue, determine your position just as you would for an assigned topic. That position will ultimately become your thesis.

Until you’ve finalized your work, consider your thesis a “working thesis.”

This means that your statement represents your position, but you might change its phrasing or structure for that final version.

When you’re writing an essay for a class, it can seem strange to identify an audience—isn’t the audience the instructor?

Your instructor will read and evaluate your essay, and may be part of your greater audience, but you shouldn’t just write for your teacher.

Think about who your intended audience is.

For an argument essay, think of your audience as the people who disagree with you—the people who need convincing.

That population could be quite broad, for example, if you’re arguing a political issue, or narrow, if you’re trying to convince your parents to extend your curfew.

Once you’ve got a sense of your audience, it’s time to consult with Aristotle. Aristotle’s teaching on persuasion has shaped communication since about 330 BC. Apparently, it works.

Aristotle taught that in order to convince an audience of something, the communicator needs to balance the three elements of the rhetorical triangle to achieve the best results.

Those three elements are ethos , logos , and pathos .

Ethos relates to credibility and trustworthiness. How can you, as the writer, demonstrate your credibility as a source of information to your audience?

How will you show them you are worthy of their trust?

• You show you’ve done your research: you understand the issue, both sides
• You show respect for the opposing side: if you disrespect your audience, they won’t respect you or your ideas

Logos relates to logic. How will you convince your audience that your arguments and ideas are reasonable?

You provide facts or other supporting evidence to support your claims.

That evidence may take the form of studies or expert input or reasonable examples or a combination of all of those things, depending on the specific requirements of your assignment.

Remember: if you use someone else’s ideas or words in your essay, you need to give them credit.

ProWritingAid's Plagiarism Checker checks your work against over a billion web-pages, published works, and academic papers so you can be sure of its originality.

Find out more about ProWritingAid’s Plagiarism checks.

Pathos relates to emotion. Audiences are people and people are emotional beings. We respond to emotional prompts. How will you engage your audience with your arguments on an emotional level?

• You make strategic word choices : words have denotations (dictionary meanings) and also connotations, or emotional values. Use words whose connotations will help prompt the feelings you want your audience to experience.
• You use emotionally engaging examples to support your claims or make a point, prompting your audience to be moved by your discussion.

Be mindful as you lean into elements of the triangle. Too much pathos and your audience might end up feeling manipulated, roll their eyes and move on.

An “all logos” approach will leave your essay dry and without a sense of voice; it will probably bore your audience rather than make them care.

Once you’ve got your essay planned, start writing! Don’t worry about perfection, just get your ideas out of your head and off your list and into a rough essay format.

After you’ve written your draft, evaluate your work. What works and what doesn’t? For help with evaluating and revising your work, check out this ProWritingAid post on manuscript revision .

After you’ve evaluated your draft, revise it. Repeat that process as many times as you need to make your work the best it can be.

When you’re satisfied with the content and structure of the essay, take it through the editing process .

Grammatical or sentence-level errors can distract your audience or even detract from the ethos—the authority—of your work.

You don’t have to edit alone! ProWritingAid’s Realtime Report will find errors and make suggestions for improvements.

You can even use it on emails to your professors:

Try ProWritingAid with a free account.

How Can I Improve My Persuasion Skills?

You can develop your powers of persuasion every day just by observing what’s around you.

• How is that advertisement working to convince you to buy a product?
• How is a political candidate arguing for you to vote for them?
• How do you “argue” with friends about what to do over the weekend, or convince your boss to give you a raise?
• How are your parents working to convince you to follow a certain academic or career path?

As you observe these arguments in action, evaluate them. Why are they effective or why do they fail?

How could an argument be strengthened with more (or less) emphasis on ethos, logos, and pathos?

Every argument is an opportunity to learn! Observe them, evaluate them, and use them to perfect your own powers of persuasion.

Be confident about grammar

Check every email, essay, or story for grammar mistakes. Fix them before you press send.

Allison Bressmer is a professor of freshman composition and critical reading at a community college and a freelance writer. If she isn’t writing or teaching, you’ll likely find her reading a book or listening to a podcast while happily sipping a semi-sweet iced tea or happy-houring with friends. She lives in New York with her family. Connect at linkedin.com/in/allisonbressmer.

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Persuasive Essay: A Guide for Writing

Ever found yourself wrestling with the challenge of convincing others through your writing? Look no further – our guide is your go-to roadmap for mastering the art of persuasion. In a world where effective communication is key, this article unveils practical tips and techniques to help you produce compelling arguments that captivate your audience. Say goodbye to the struggles of conveying your message – let's learn how to make your persuasive essay informative and truly convincing.

What Is a Persuasive Essay

Persuasive essays are a form of writing that aims to sway the reader's viewpoint or prompt them to take a specific action. In this genre, the author employs logical reasoning and compelling arguments to convince the audience of a particular perspective or stance on a given topic. The persuasive essay typically presents a clear thesis statement, followed by well-structured paragraphs that provide evidence and examples supporting the author's position. The ultimate goal is to inform and influence the reader's beliefs or behavior by appealing to their emotions, logic, and sense of reason. If you need urgent help with this assignment, use our persuasive essay writing service without hesitation.

Which Three Strategies Are Elements of a Persuasive Essay

Working on a persuasive essay is like building a solid argument with three friends: ethos, pathos, and logos. Ethos is about trustworthiness, like when someone vouches for your credibility before making a point. Picture it as your introduction, earning trust from the get-go. Then comes pathos, your emotional storyteller. It's all about making your readers feel something, turning your essay into an experience rather than just a bunch of words. Lastly, logos is your logical thinker, using facts and solid reasoning to beef up your argument. These three work together to engage both the heart and mind of your audience. So, let's see how this trio can take your arguments from so-so to memorable.

In a persuasive essay, ethos functions much like introducing your friend as the go-to expert in their field before they share their insights with a new group. It's about showcasing the writer's credibility, expertise, and trustworthiness through a mix of personal experience, professional background, and perhaps even endorsements. Readers are more likely to buy into an argument when they believe the person presenting it knows their stuff and has a solid ethical standing, creating a foundation of trust. Does this information seem a bit confusing? Then simply type, ‘ write my paper ,’ and our writers will help you immediately.

Now, let's consider pathos – the emotional connection element. Imagine a movie that entertains and makes you laugh, cry, or feel a rush of excitement. Pathos in a persuasive essay aims to tap into your emotions to make you feel something. It's the storyteller in the essay weaving narratives that resonate personally. By sharing relatable anecdotes, vivid imagery, or emotionally charged language, writers can create a powerful connection with readers, turning a dry argument into a compelling human experience that leaves a lasting impression.

Lastly, logos is the cool-headed, logical friend who always has the facts straight. In a persuasive essay, logos presents a strong, well-reasoned argument supported by evidence, data, and solid reasoning. The backbone holds the essay together, appealing to the reader's sense of logic and reason. This might include citing research studies, providing statistical evidence, or employing deductive reasoning to build a solid case. So, think of ethos as your trustworthy friend, pathos as the emotional storyteller, and logos as the rational thinker – together, they create a persuasive essay that speaks to the heart and stands up to critical scrutiny. Choose the persuasive essay format accordingly, depending on how you’d like to approach your readers.

Persuasive Essay Outline

Creating an outline for persuasive essay is like sketching a plan for your argument, which is the GPS to help your readers follow along smoothly. Start with an engaging intro that grabs attention and states your main point. Then, organize your body paragraphs, each focusing on one important aspect or evidence backing up your main idea. Mix in ethos (credibility), pathos (emotion), and logos (logic) throughout to make your argument strong. Don't forget to address opposing views and show why your stance is the way to go. Finally, wrap things up with a strong conclusion that reinforces your main points. Here’s a general outline for a persuasive essay:

How to start a persuasive essay? Introduction. 

• Hook. Start with a captivating anecdote, surprising fact, or thought-provoking question to grab the reader's attention.
• Background. Provide context for the issue or topic you're addressing.
• Thesis Statement. Clearly state your main argument or position.

Body Paragraphs

Paragraph 1

• Topic Sentence. Introduce the first key point supporting your thesis.
• Supporting Evidence. Include facts, statistics, or examples that back up your point.
• Ethos, Pathos, Logos. Incorporate elements of persuasion to strengthen your argument.

Paragraph 2

• Topic Sentence. Introduce the second key point supporting your thesis.
• Supporting Evidence. Provide relevant information or examples to bolster your argument.
• Ethos, Pathos, Logos. Continue integrating persuasive elements for a well-rounded appeal.

Paragraph 3

• Topic Sentence. Introduce the third key point supporting your thesis.
• Supporting Evidence. Present compelling evidence or examples.
• Ethos, Pathos, Logos. Ensure a balanced use of persuasive strategies.

Counterargument

• Address opposing views. Acknowledge and counter opposing arguments.
• Refutation. Explain why the counterargument is invalid or less convincing.
• Summarize main points. Recap the key arguments from the body paragraphs.
• Call to Action. Encourage readers to take a specific stance, consider your perspective, or engage in further discussion.

Closing Statement

• Leave a lasting impression. End with a powerful statement that reinforces your thesis and strongly impacts the reader.

We recommend you study our guide on how to write an argumentative essay as well, as these two types of assignments are the most common in school and college.

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How to WritHow to Write a Persuasive Essay

Writing a persuasive essay typically follows a structured format that begins with a compelling introduction, where the writer captures the reader's attention with a hook, provides background information on the topic, and presents a clear thesis statement outlining the main argument. The body paragraphs delve into supporting evidence and key points, each focusing on a specific aspect of the argument and incorporating persuasive elements such as ethos, pathos, and logos. Counterarguments are addressed and refuted to strengthen the overall stance. The conclusion briefly summarizes the main points, reiterates the thesis, and often includes a call to action or a thought-provoking statement to leave a lasting impression on the reader. Follow these tips if you want to learn how to write a good persuasive essay up to the mark: 

Choose a Strong Topic

Selecting a compelling topic is crucial for a persuasive essay. Consider issues that matter to your audience and elicit strong emotions. A well-chosen topic captures your readers' interest and provides a solid foundation for building a persuasive argument. If you’re low on ideas, check out a collection of persuasive essay topics from our experts.

Research Thoroughly

Thorough research is the backbone of a persuasive essay. Dive into various sources, including academic journals, reputable websites, and books. Ensure that your information is current and reliable. Understanding the counterarguments will help you anticipate objections and strengthen your position.

Brainstorm a Solid Thesis Statement

Your thesis statement serves as the central point of your essay. It should be clear, concise, and specific, outlining your stance. Consider it a guideline for your readers, guiding them through your argument. A strong thesis statement sets the tone for the entire essay and helps maintain focus.

Organize Your Thoughts

A rigid persuasive essay structure is key to creating a desired effect on readers. Begin with an engaging introduction that introduces your topic, provides context, and ends with a clear thesis statement. The body paragraphs should each focus on a single point that supports your thesis, providing evidence and examples. Transition smoothly between paragraphs to ensure a cohesive flow. Conclude with a powerful summary that reinforces your main points and leaves a lasting impression.

Develop Compelling Arguments

Each body paragraph should present a persuasive argument supported by evidence. Clearly articulate your main points and use examples, statistics, or expert opinions to strengthen your claims. Make sure to address potential counterarguments and refute them, demonstrating the robustness of your position.

• Use Persuasive Language

Employ language that is strong, clear, and persuasive. Be mindful of your tone, avoiding overly aggressive or confrontational language. Appeal to your audience's emotions, logic, and credibility. Use rhetorical devices like anecdotes or powerful metaphors to make your writing more engaging and memorable.

Revise and Edit

The final step is revising and editing your essay. Take the time to review your work for clarity, coherence, and grammar. Ensure that your arguments flow logically and eliminate any unnecessary repetition. Consider seeking feedback from peers or mentors to gain valuable perspectives on the strength of your persuasive essay. You should also explore the guide on how to write a synthesis essay , as you’ll be dealing with it quite often as a student.

Tips for Writing a Persuasive Essay

The most important aspect of writing a persuasive essay is constructing a compelling and well-supported argument. A persuasive essay's strength hinges on the clarity and persuasiveness of the main argument, encapsulated in a robust thesis statement. This central claim should be clearly articulated and supported by compelling evidence, logical reasoning, and an understanding of the target audience. Here are more tips for you to consider:

• Write a Compelling Hook

Begin your essay with a captivating hook that grabs the reader's attention. This could be a surprising fact, a thought-provoking question, a relevant quote, or a compelling anecdote. A strong opening sets the tone for the rest of the essay.

• Establish Credibility

Build your credibility by demonstrating your expertise on the topic. Incorporate well-researched facts, statistics, or expert opinions that support your argument. Establishing credibility enhances the persuasiveness of your essay.

• Clearly Articulate Your Thesis

Craft a clear and concise thesis statement that outlines your main argument. This statement should convey your position on the issue and provide a path for the reader to follow throughout the essay. Note that if you use custom essay writing services , a thesis is automatically included in the assignment.

• Organize Your Arguments Effectively

Structure your essay with a logical flow. Each paragraph should focus on a single point that supports your thesis. Use transitional phrases to guide the reader smoothly from one idea to the next. This organizational clarity enhances the persuasive impact of your essay.

• Address Counterarguments

Anticipate and address potential counterarguments to strengthen your position. Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and provide compelling reasons why your stance is more valid. This demonstrates a thorough understanding of the topic and reinforces the credibility of your argument.

Choose words and phrases that evoke emotion and engage your reader. Employ rhetorical devices, such as metaphors, similes, or vivid language, to make your argument more compelling. Pay attention to tone, maintaining a respectful and persuasive demeanor.

• Appeal to Emotions and Logic

Strike a balance between emotional appeal and logical reasoning. Use real-life examples, personal stories, or emotional anecdotes to connect with your audience. Simultaneously, support your arguments with logical reasoning and evidence to build a robust case.

• Create a Strong Conclusion

Summarize your main points in the conclusion and restate the significance of your thesis. End with a powerful call to action or a thought-provoking statement that leaves a lasting impression on the reader. A strong conclusion reinforces the persuasive impact of your essay.

Persuasive Essay Examples

Explore the persuasive essay examples provided below to gain a deeper comprehension of crafting this type of document.

Persuasive Essay Example: Are Women Weaker Than Men Today?

Students should explore persuasive essay examples as they provide valuable insights into effective argumentation, organizational structure, and the art of persuasion. Examining well-crafted samples allows students to grasp various writing techniques, understand how to present compelling evidence, and observe the nuanced ways in which authors address counterarguments. Additionally, exposure to diverse examples helps students refine their own writing style and encourages critical thinking by showcasing the diversity of perspectives and strategies. Here are two excellent persuasive essay examples pdf for your inspiration. If you enjoy the work of our writers, buy essay paper from them and receive an equally quality document prepared individually for you.

Example 1: “The Importance of Incorporating Financial Literacy Education in High School Curriculum”

This essay advocates for the imperative inclusion of financial literacy education in the high school curriculum. It emphasizes the critical role that early exposure to financial concepts plays in empowering students for lifelong success, preventing cycles of debt, fostering responsible citizenship, adapting to technological advancements, and building a more inclusive society. By arguing that financial literacy is a practical necessity and a crucial step towards developing informed and responsible citizens, the essay underscores the long-term societal benefits of equipping high school students with essential financial knowledge and skills.

Example 2: “Renewable Energy: A Call to Action for a Sustainable Future”

This persuasive essay argues for the urgent adoption of renewable energy sources as a moral imperative and a strategic move towards mitigating climate change, fostering economic growth, achieving energy independence, and driving technological innovation. The essay emphasizes the environmental, economic, and societal benefits of transitioning from conventional energy to renewable alternatives, asserting that such a shift is not just an environmentally conscious choice but a responsible investment in the sustainability and well-being of the planet for current and future generations.

Knowing how to write a persuasive essay is essential for several reasons. Firstly, it cultivates critical thinking and analytical skills, requiring students to evaluate and organize information effectively to support their arguments. This process enhances their ability to assess different perspectives and make informed decisions. The persuasive essay format also equips students with valuable communication skills, teaching them to articulate ideas clearly and convincingly. As effective communicators, students can advocate for their viewpoints, contributing to a more engaged and informed society. This proficiency extends beyond academic settings, proving crucial in various professional and personal scenarios. If you’d like to expedite the process, consider using our essay service , which saves time and brings positive grades.

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What are the 7 Tips for Persuasive Essays?

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How to Write a Persuasive Essay (This Convinced My Professor!)

Table of contents

Meredith Sell

You can make your essay more persuasive by getting straight to the point.

In fact, that's exactly what we did here, and that's just the first tip of this guide. Throughout this guide, we share the steps needed to prove an argument and create a persuasive essay.

This AI tool helps you improve your essay > This AI tool helps you improve your essay >

Key takeaways: - Proven process to make any argument persuasive - 5-step process to structure arguments - How to use AI to formulate and optimize your essay

Why is being persuasive so difficult?

"Write an essay that persuades the reader of your opinion on a topic of your choice."

You might be staring at an assignment description just like this 👆from your professor. Your computer is open to a blank document, the cursor blinking impatiently. Do I even have opinions?

The persuasive essay can be one of the most intimidating academic papers to write: not only do you need to identify a narrow topic and research it, but you also have to come up with a position on that topic that you can back up with research while simultaneously addressing different viewpoints.

That’s a big ask. And let’s be real: most opinion pieces in major news publications don’t fulfill these requirements.

The upside? By researching and writing your own opinion, you can learn how to better formulate not only an argument but the actual positions you decide to hold. 

Here, we break down exactly how to write a persuasive essay. We’ll start by taking a step that’s key for every piece of writing—defining the terms.

What Is a Persuasive Essay?

A persuasive essay is exactly what it sounds like: an essay that persuades . Over the course of several paragraphs or pages, you’ll use researched facts and logic to convince the reader of your opinion on a particular topic and discredit opposing opinions.

While you’ll spend some time explaining the topic or issue in question, most of your essay will flesh out your viewpoint and the evidence that supports it.

The 5 Must-Have Steps of a Persuasive Essay

If you’re intimidated by the idea of writing an argument, use this list to break your process into manageable chunks. Tackle researching and writing one element at a time, and then revise your essay so that it flows smoothly and coherently with every component in the optimal place.

1. A topic or issue to argue

This is probably the hardest step. You need to identify a topic or issue that is narrow enough to cover in the length of your piece—and is also arguable from more than one position. Your topic must call for an opinion , and not be a simple fact .

It might be helpful to walk through this process:

• Identify a random topic
• Ask a question about the topic that involves a value claim or analysis to answer
• Answer the question

That answer is your opinion.

Let’s consider some examples, from silly to serious:

Topic: Dolphins and mermaids

Question: In a mythical match, who would win: a dolphin or a mermaid?

Answer/Opinion: The mermaid would win in a match against a dolphin.

Topic: Autumn

Question: Which has a better fall: New England or Colorado?

Answer/Opinion: Fall is better in New England than Colorado.

Topic: Electric transportation options

Question: Would it be better for an urban dweller to buy an electric bike or an electric car?

Answer/Opinion: An electric bike is a better investment than an electric car.

Your turn: Walk through the three-step process described above to identify your topic and your tentative opinion. You may want to start by brainstorming a list of topics you find interesting and then going use the three-step process to find the opinion that would make the best essay topic.

2. An unequivocal thesis statement

If you walked through our three-step process above, you already have some semblance of a thesis—but don’t get attached too soon! 

A solid essay thesis is best developed through the research process. You shouldn’t land on an opinion before you know the facts. So press pause. Take a step back. And dive into your research.

You’ll want to learn:

• The basic facts of your topic. How long does fall last in New England vs. Colorado? What trees do they have? What colors do those trees turn?
• The facts specifically relevant to your question. Is there any science on how the varying colors of fall influence human brains and moods?
• What experts or other noteworthy and valid sources say about the question you’re considering. Has a well-known arborist waxed eloquent on the beauty of New England falls?

As you learn the different viewpoints people have on your topic, pay attention to the strengths and weaknesses of existing arguments. Is anyone arguing the perspective you’re leaning toward? Do you find their arguments convincing? What do you find unsatisfying about the various arguments? 

Allow the research process to change your mind and/or refine your thinking on the topic. Your opinion may change entirely or become more specific based on what you learn.

Once you’ve done enough research to feel confident in your understanding of the topic and your opinion on it, craft your thesis. 

Your thesis statement should be clear and concise. It should directly state your viewpoint on the topic, as well as the basic case for your thesis.

Thesis 1: In a mythical match, the mermaid would overcome the dolphin due to one distinct advantage: her ability to breathe underwater.

Thesis 2: The full spectrum of color displayed on New England hillsides is just one reason why fall in the northeast is better than in Colorado.

Thesis 3: In addition to not adding to vehicle traffic, electric bikes are a better investment than electric cars because they’re cheaper and require less energy to accomplish the same function of getting the rider from point A to point B.

Your turn: Dive into the research process with a radar up for the arguments your sources are making about your topic. What are the most convincing cases? Should you stick with your initial opinion or change it up? Write your fleshed-out thesis statement.

3. Evidence to back up your thesis

This is a typical place for everyone from undergrads to politicians to get stuck, but the good news is, if you developed your thesis from research, you already have a good bit of evidence to make your case.

Go back through your research notes and compile a list of every …

… or other piece of information that supports your thesis. 

This info can come from research studies you found in scholarly journals, government publications, news sources, encyclopedias, or other credible sources (as long as they fit your professor’s standards).

As you put this list together, watch for any gaps or weak points. Are you missing information on how electric cars versus electric bicycles charge or how long their batteries last? Did you verify that dolphins are, in fact, mammals and can’t breathe underwater like totally-real-and-not-at-all-fake 😉mermaids can? Track down that information.

Next, organize your list. Group the entries so that similar or closely related information is together, and as you do that, start thinking through how to articulate the individual arguments to support your case. 

Depending on the length of your essay, each argument may get only a paragraph or two of space. As you think through those specific arguments, consider what order to put them in. You’ll probably want to start with the simplest argument and work up to more complicated ones so that the arguments can build on each other. 

Your turn: Organize your evidence and write a rough draft of your arguments. Play around with the order to find the most compelling way to argue your case.

4. Rebuttals to disprove opposing theses

You can’t just present the evidence to support your case and totally ignore other viewpoints. To persuade your readers, you’ll need to address any opposing ideas they may hold about your topic. 

You probably found some holes in the opposing views during your research process. Now’s your chance to expose those holes. 

Take some time (and space) to: describe the opposing views and show why those views don’t hold up. You can accomplish this using both logic and facts.

Is a perspective based on a faulty assumption or misconception of the truth? Shoot it down by providing the facts that disprove the opinion.

Is another opinion drawn from bad or unsound reasoning? Show how that argument falls apart.

Some cases may truly be only a matter of opinion, but you still need to articulate why you don’t find the opposing perspective convincing.

Yes, a dolphin might be stronger than a mermaid, but as a mammal, the dolphin must continually return to the surface for air. A mermaid can breathe both underwater and above water, which gives her a distinct advantage in this mythical battle.

While the Rocky Mountain views are stunning, their limited colors—yellow from aspen trees and green from various evergreens—leaves the autumn-lover less than thrilled. The rich reds and oranges and yellows of the New England fall are more satisfying and awe-inspiring.

But what about longer trips that go beyond the city center into the suburbs and beyond? An electric bike wouldn’t be great for those excursions. Wouldn’t an electric car be the better choice then? 

Certainly, an electric car would be better in these cases than a gas-powered car, but if most of a person’s trips are in their hyper-local area, the electric bicycle is a more environmentally friendly option for those day-to-day outings. That person could then participate in a carshare or use public transit, a ride-sharing app, or even a gas-powered car for longer trips—and still use less energy overall than if they drove an electric car for hyper-local and longer area trips.

Your turn: Organize your rebuttal research and write a draft of each one.

5. A convincing conclusion

You have your arguments and rebuttals. You’ve proven your thesis is rock-solid. Now all you have to do is sum up your overall case and give your final word on the subject. 

Don’t repeat everything you’ve already said. Instead, your conclusion should logically draw from the arguments you’ve made to show how they coherently prove your thesis. You’re pulling everything together and zooming back out with a better understanding of the what and why of your thesis. 

A dolphin may never encounter a mermaid in the wild, but if it were to happen, we know how we’d place our bets. Long hair and fish tail, for the win.

For those of us who relish 50-degree days, sharp air, and the vibrant colors of fall, New England offers a season that’s cozier, longer-lasting, and more aesthetically pleasing than “colorful” Colorado. A leaf-peeper’s paradise.

When most of your trips from day to day are within five miles, the more energy-efficient—and yes, cost-efficient—choice is undoubtedly the electric bike. So strap on your helmet, fire up your pedals, and two-wheel away to your next destination with full confidence that you made the right decision for your wallet and the environment.

3 Quick Tips for Writing a Strong Argument

Once you have a draft to work with, use these tips to refine your argument and make sure you’re not losing readers for avoidable reasons.

1. Choose your words thoughtfully.

If you want to win people over to your side, don’t write in a way that shuts your opponents down. Avoid making abrasive or offensive statements. Instead, use a measured, reasonable tone. Appeal to shared values, and let your facts and logic do the hard work of changing people’s minds.

Choose words with AI

You can use AI to turn your general point into a readable argument. Then, you can paraphrase each sentence and choose between competing arguments generated by the AI, until your argument is well-articulated and concise.

2. Prioritize accuracy (and avoid fallacies).

Make sure the facts you use are actually factual. You don’t want to build your argument on false or disproven information. Use the most recent, respected research. Make sure you don’t misconstrue study findings. And when you’re building your case, avoid logical fallacies that undercut your argument.

A few common fallacies to watch out for:

• Strawman: Misrepresenting or oversimplifying an opposing argument to make it easier to refute.
• Appeal to ignorance: Arguing that a certain claim must be true because it hasn’t been proven false.
• Bandwagon: Assumes that if a group of people, experts, etc., agree with a claim, it must be true.
• Hasty generalization: Using a few examples, rather than substantial evidence, to make a sweeping claim.
• Appeal to authority: Overly relying on opinions of people who have authority of some kind.

The strongest arguments rely on trustworthy information and sound logic.

Research and add citations with AI

We recently wrote a three part piece on researching using AI, so be sure to check it out . Going through an organized process of researching and noting your sources correctly will make sure your written text is more accurate.

3. Persuasive essay structure

If you’re building a house, you start with the foundation and go from there. It’s the same with an argument. You want to build from the ground up: provide necessary background information, then your thesis. Then, start with the simplest part of your argument and build up in terms of complexity and the aspect of your thesis that the argument is tackling.

A consistent, internal logic will make it easier for the reader to follow your argument. Plus, you’ll avoid confusing your reader and you won’t be unnecessarily redundant.

The essay structure usually includes the following parts:

• Intro - Hook, Background information, Thesis statement
• Topic sentence #1 , with supporting facts or stats
• Concluding sentence
• Topic sentence #2 , with supporting facts or stats
• Concluding sentence Topic sentence #3 , with supporting facts or stats
• Conclusion - Thesis and main points restated, call to action, thought provoking ending

Are You Ready to Write?

Persuasive essays are a great way to hone your research, writing, and critical thinking skills. Approach this assignment well, and you’ll learn how to form opinions based on information (not just ideas) and make arguments that—if they don’t change minds—at least win readers’ respect. ‍

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How to Write a Persuasive Essay

Last Updated: December 17, 2023 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Christopher Taylor, PhD . Christopher Taylor is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Austin Community College in Texas. He received his PhD in English Literature and Medieval Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There are 14 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 4,276,514 times.

A persuasive essay is an essay used to convince a reader about a particular idea or focus, usually one that you believe in. Your persuasive essay could be based on anything about which you have an opinion or that you can make a clear argument about. Whether you're arguing against junk food at school or petitioning for a raise from your boss, knowing how to write a persuasive essay is an important skill that everyone should have.

Sample Persuasive Essays

How to Lay the Groundwork

• Look for language that gives you a clue as to whether you are writing a purely persuasive or an argumentative essay. For example, if the prompt uses words like “personal experience” or “personal observations,” you know that these things can be used to support your argument.
• On the other hand, words like “defend” or “argue” suggest that you should be writing an argumentative essay, which may require more formal, less personal evidence.
• If you aren’t sure about what you’re supposed to write, ask your instructor.

• Whenever possible, start early. This way, even if you have emergencies like a computer meltdown, you’ve given yourself enough time to complete your essay.

• Try using stasis theory to help you examine the rhetorical situation. This is when you look at the facts, definition (meaning of the issue or the nature of it), quality (the level of seriousness of the issue), and policy (plan of action for the issue).
• To look at the facts, try asking: What happened? What are the known facts? How did this issue begin? What can people do to change the situation?
• To look at the definition, ask: What is the nature of this issue or problem? What type of problem is this? What category or class would this problem fit into best?
• To examine the quality, ask: Who is affected by this problem? How serious is it? What might happen if it is not resolved?
• To examine the policy, ask: Should someone take action? Who should do something and what should they do?

• For example, if you are arguing against unhealthy school lunches, you might take very different approaches depending on whom you want to convince. You might target the school administrators, in which case you could make a case about student productivity and healthy food. If you targeted students’ parents, you might make a case about their children’s health and the potential costs of healthcare to treat conditions caused by unhealthy food. And if you were to consider a “grassroots” movement among your fellow students, you’d probably make appeals based on personal preferences.

• It also should present the organization of your essay. Don’t list your points in one order and then discuss them in a different order.
• For example, a thesis statement could look like this: “Although pre-prepared and highly processed foods are cheap, they aren’t good for students. It is important for schools to provide fresh, healthy meals to students, even when they cost more. Healthy school lunches can make a huge difference in students’ lives, and not offering healthy lunches fails students.”
• Note that this thesis statement isn’t a three-prong thesis. You don’t have to state every sub-point you will make in your thesis (unless your prompt or assignment says to). You do need to convey exactly what you will argue.

• A mind map could be helpful. Start with your central topic and draw a box around it. Then, arrange other ideas you think of in smaller bubbles around it. Connect the bubbles to reveal patterns and identify how ideas relate. [5] X Research source
• Don’t worry about having fully fleshed-out ideas at this stage. Generating ideas is the most important step here.

• For example, if you’re arguing for healthier school lunches, you could make a point that fresh, natural food tastes better. This is a personal opinion and doesn’t need research to support it. However, if you wanted to argue that fresh food has more vitamins and nutrients than processed food, you’d need a reliable source to support that claim.
• If you have a librarian available, consult with him or her! Librarians are an excellent resource to help guide you to credible research.

How to Draft Your Essay

• An introduction. You should present a “hook” here that grabs your audience’s attention. You should also provide your thesis statement, which is a clear statement of what you will argue or attempt to convince the reader of.
• Body paragraphs. In 5-paragraph essays, you’ll have 3 body paragraphs. In other essays, you can have as many paragraphs as you need to make your argument. Regardless of their number, each body paragraph needs to focus on one main idea and provide evidence to support it. These paragraphs are also where you refute any counterpoints that you’ve discovered.
• Conclusion. Your conclusion is where you tie it all together. It can include an appeal to emotions, reiterate the most compelling evidence, or expand the relevance of your initial idea to a broader context. Because your purpose is to persuade your readers to do/think something, end with a call to action. Connect your focused topic to the broader world.

• For example, you could start an essay on the necessity of pursuing alternative energy sources like this: “Imagine a world without polar bears.” This is a vivid statement that draws on something that many readers are familiar with and enjoy (polar bears). It also encourages the reader to continue reading to learn why they should imagine this world.
• You may find that you don’t immediately have a hook. Don’t get stuck on this step! You can always press on and come back to it after you’ve drafted your essay.

• Put your hook first. Then, proceed to move from general ideas to specific ideas until you have built up to your thesis statement.
• Don't slack on your thesis statement . Your thesis statement is a short summary of what you're arguing for. It's usually one sentence, and it's near the end of your introductory paragraph. Make your thesis a combination of your most persuasive arguments, or a single powerful argument, for the best effect.

• Start with a clear topic sentence that introduces the main point of your paragraph.
• Make your evidence clear and precise. For example, don't just say: "Dolphins are very smart animals. They are widely recognized as being incredibly smart." Instead, say: "Dolphins are very smart animals. Multiple studies found that dolphins worked in tandem with humans to catch prey. Very few, if any, species have developed mutually symbiotic relationships with humans."
• "The South, which accounts for 80% of all executions in the United States, still has the country's highest murder rate. This makes a case against the death penalty working as a deterrent."
• "Additionally, states without the death penalty have fewer murders. If the death penalty were indeed a deterrent, why wouldn't we see an increase in murders in states without the death penalty?"
• Consider how your body paragraphs flow together. You want to make sure that your argument feels like it's building, one point upon another, rather than feeling scattered.

• End of the first paragraph: "If the death penalty consistently fails to deter crime, and crime is at an all-time high, what happens when someone is wrongfully convicted?"
• Beginning of the second paragraph: "Over 100 wrongfully convicted death row inmates have been acquitted of their crimes, some just minutes before their would-be death."

• Example: "Critics of a policy allowing students to bring snacks into the classroom say that it would create too much distraction, reducing students’ ability to learn. However, consider the fact that middle schoolers are growing at an incredible rate. Their bodies need energy, and their minds may become fatigued if they go for long periods without eating. Allowing snacks in the classroom will actually increase students’ ability to focus by taking away the distraction of hunger.”
• You may even find it effective to begin your paragraph with the counterargument, then follow by refuting it and offering your own argument.

• How could this argument be applied to a broader context?
• Why does this argument or opinion mean something to me?
• What further questions has my argument raised?
• What action could readers take after reading my essay?

How to Write Persuasively

• Persuasive essays, like argumentative essays, use rhetorical devices to persuade their readers. In persuasive essays, you generally have more freedom to make appeals to emotion (pathos), in addition to logic and data (logos) and credibility (ethos). [13] X Trustworthy Source Read Write Think Online collection of reading and writing resources for teachers and students. Go to source
• You should use multiple types of evidence carefully when writing a persuasive essay. Logical appeals such as presenting data, facts, and other types of “hard” evidence are often very convincing to readers.
• Persuasive essays generally have very clear thesis statements that make your opinion or chosen “side” known upfront. This helps your reader know exactly what you are arguing. [14] X Research source
• Bad: The United States was not an educated nation, since education was considered the right of the wealthy, and so in the early 1800s Horace Mann decided to try and rectify the situation.

• For example, you could tell an anecdote about a family torn apart by the current situation in Syria to incorporate pathos, make use of logic to argue for allowing Syrian refugees as your logos, and then provide reputable sources to back up your quotes for ethos.
• Example: Time and time again, the statistics don't lie -- we need to open our doors to help refugees.
• Example: "Let us not forget the words etched on our grandest national monument, the Statue of Liberty, which asks that we "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” There is no reason why Syrians are not included in this.
• Example: "Over 100 million refugees have been displaced. President Assad has not only stolen power, he's gassed and bombed his own citizens. He has defied the Geneva Conventions, long held as a standard of decency and basic human rights, and his people have no choice but to flee."

• Good: "Time and time again, science has shown that arctic drilling is dangerous. It is not worth the risks environmentally or economically."
• Good: "Without pushing ourselves to energy independence, in the arctic and elsewhere, we open ourselves up to the dangerous dependency that spiked gas prices in the 80's."
• Bad: "Arctic drilling may not be perfect, but it will probably help us stop using foreign oil at some point. This, I imagine, will be a good thing."

• Good: Does anyone think that ruining someone’s semester, or, at least, the chance to go abroad, should be the result of a victimless crime? Is it fair that we actively promote drinking as a legitimate alternative through Campus Socials and a lack of consequences? How long can we use the excuse that “just because it’s safer than alcohol doesn’t mean we should make it legal,” disregarding the fact that the worst effects of the drug are not physical or chemical, but institutional?
• Good: We all want less crime, stronger families, and fewer dangerous confrontations over drugs. We need to ask ourselves, however, if we're willing to challenge the status quo to get those results.
• Bad: This policy makes us look stupid. It is not based in fact, and the people that believe it are delusional at best, and villains at worst.

• Good: While people do have accidents with guns in their homes, it is not the government’s responsibility to police people from themselves. If they're going to hurt themselves, that is their right.
• Bad: The only obvious solution is to ban guns. There is no other argument that matters.

How to Polish Your Essay

• Does the essay state its position clearly?
• Is this position supported throughout with evidence and examples?
• Are paragraphs bogged down by extraneous information? Do paragraphs focus on one main idea?
• Are any counterarguments presented fairly, without misrepresentation? Are they convincingly dismissed?
• Are the paragraphs in an order that flows logically and builds an argument step-by-step?
• Does the conclusion convey the importance of the position and urge the reader to do/think something?

• You may find it helpful to ask a trusted friend or classmate to look at your essay. If s/he has trouble understanding your argument or finds things unclear, focus your revision on those spots.

• You may find it helpful to print out your draft and mark it up with a pen or pencil. When you write on the computer, your eyes may become so used to reading what you think you’ve written that they skip over errors. Working with a physical copy forces you to pay attention in a new way.
• Make sure to also format your essay correctly. For example, many instructors stipulate the margin width and font type you should use.

Expert Q&A

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-write-a-persuasive-essay/
• ↑ https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/centers/writing/writing-resources/persuasive-essays
• ↑ https://www.hamilton.edu/writing/writing-resources/persuasive-essays
• ↑ https://www.adelaide.edu.au/writingcentre/sites/default/files/docs/learningguide-mindmapping.pdf
• ↑ https://examples.yourdictionary.com/20-compelling-hook-examples-for-essays.html
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/transitions/
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/common_writing_assignments/argument_papers/rebuttal_sections.html
• ↑ http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson56/strategy-definition.pdf
• ↑ https://stlcc.edu/student-support/academic-success-and-tutoring/writing-center/writing-resources/pathos-logos-and-ethos.aspx
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/editing-and-proofreading/
• ↑ https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/revising-drafts/
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/proofreading/proofreading_suggestions.html

About This Article

To write a persuasive essay, start with an attention-grabbing introduction that introduces your thesis statement or main argument. Then, break the body of your essay up into multiple paragraphs and focus on one main idea in each paragraph. Make sure you present evidence in each paragraph that supports the main idea so your essay is more persuasive. Finally, conclude your essay by restating the most compelling, important evidence so you can make your case one last time. To learn how to make your writing more persuasive, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Home / Guides / Writing Guides / Paper Types / How to Write a Persuasive Essay

How to Write a Persuasive Essay

The entire point of a persuasive essay is to persuade or convince the reader to agree with your perspective on the topic. In this type of essay, you’re not limited to facts. It’s completely acceptable to include your opinions and back them up with facts, where necessary.

Guide Overview

• Be assertive
• Use words that evoke emotion
• Make it personal
• Topic selection hints

Tricks for Writing a Persuasive Essay

In this type of writing, you’ll find it is particularly helpful to focus on the emotional side of things. Make your reader feel what you feel and bring them into your way of thinking. There are a few ways to do that.

Be Assertive

A persuasive essay doesn’t have to be gentle in how it presents your opinion. You really want people to agree with you, so focus on making that happen, even if it means pushing the envelope a little. You’ll tend to get higher grades for this, because the essay is more likely to convince the reader to agree. Consider using an Persuasive Essay Template to understand the key elements of the essay.

Use Words that Evoke Emotion

It’s easier to get people to see things your way when they feel an emotional connection. As you describe your topic, make sure to incorporate words that cause people to feel an emotion. For example, instead of saying, “children are taken from their parents” you might say, “children are torn from the loving arms of their parents, kicking and screaming.” Dramatic? Yes, but it gets the point across and helps your reader experience the

Make it Personal

By using first person, you make the reader feel like they know you. Talking about the reader in second person can help them feel included and begin to imagine themselves in your shoes. Telling someone “many people are affected by this” and telling them “you are affected by this every day” will have very different results.

While each of these tips can help improve your essay, there’s no rule that you have to actually persuade for your own point of view. If you feel the essay would be more interesting if you take the opposite stance, why not write it that way? This will require more research and thinking, but you could end up with a very unique essay that will catch the teacher’s eye.

Topic Selection Hints

A persuasive essay requires a topic that has multiple points of view. In most cases, topics like the moon being made of rock would be difficult to argue, since this is a solid fact. This means you’ll need to choose something that has more than one reasonable opinion related to it.

A good topic for a persuasive essay would be something that you could persuade for or against.

Some examples include:

• Should children be required to use booster seats until age 12?
• Should schools allow the sale of sugary desserts and candy?
• Should marijuana use be legal?
• Should high school students be confined to school grounds during school hours?
• Should GMO food be labeled by law?
• Should police be required to undergo sensitivity training?
• Should the United States withdraw troops from overseas?

Some topics are more controversial than others, but any of these could be argued from either point of view . . . some even allow for multiple points of view.

As you write your persuasive essay, remember that your goal is to get the reader to nod their head and agree with you. Each section of the essay should bring you closer to this goal. If you write the essay with this in mind, you’ll end up with a paper that will receive high grades.

Finally, if you’re ever facing writer’s block for your college paper, consider WriteWell’s template gallery to help you get started.

EasyBib Writing Resources

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• Argumentative Essay
• College Admissions Essay
• Expository Essay
• Persuasive Essay
• Research Paper
• Thesis Statement
• Writing a Conclusion
• Writing an Introduction
• Writing an Outline
• Writing a Summary

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65 Tips for Writing Academic Persuasive Essays

The previous chapters in this section offer an overview of what it means to formulate an argument in an academic situation. The purpose of this chapter is to offer more concrete, actionable tips for drafting an academic persuasive essay. Keep in mind that preparing to draft a persuasive essay relies on the strategies for any other thesis-driven essay, covered by the section in this textbook, The Writing Process. The following chapters can be read in concert with this one:

• Critical Reading and other research strategies helps writers identify the exigence (issue) that demands a response, as well as what kinds of research to use.
• Generate Ideas covers prewriting models (such as brainstorming techniques) that allow students to make interesting connections and develop comprehensive thesis statements. These connections and main points will allow a writer to outline their core argument.
• Organizing is important for understanding why an argument essay needs a detailed plan, before the drafting stage. For an argument essay, start with a basic outline that identifies the claim, reasoning, and evidence, but be prepared to develop more detailed outlines that include counterarguments and rebuttals, warrants, additional backing, etc., as needed.
• Drafting introduces students to basic compositional strategies that they must be familiar with before beginning an argument essay. This current chapter offers more details about what kinds of paragraphs to practice in an argument essay, but it assumes the writer is familiar with basic strategies such as coherence and cohesion.

Classical structure of an argument essay

Academic persuasive essays tend to follow what’s known as the “classical” structure, based on techniques that derive from ancient Roman and Medieval rhetoricians. John D. Ramage, et. al outline this structure in Writing Arguments :

This very detailed table can be simplified. Most academic persuasive essays include the following basic elements:

• Introduction that explains why the situation is important and presents your argument (aka the claim or thesis).
• Reasons the thesis is correct or at least reasonable.
• Evidence that supports each reason, often occurring right after the reason the evidence supports.
• Acknowledgement of objections.
• Response to objections.

Keep in mind that the structure above is just a conventional starting point. The previous chapters of this section suggest how different kinds of arguments (Classical/Aristotelian, Toulmin, Rogerian) involve slightly different approaches, and your course, instructor, and specific assignment prompt may include its own specific instructions on how to complete the assignment. There are many different variations. At the same time, however, most academic argumentative/persuasive essays expect you to practice the techniques mentioned below. These tips overlap with the elements of argumentation, covered in that chapter, but they offer more explicit examples for how they might look in paragraph form, beginning with the introduction to your essay.

Persuasive introductions should move from context to thesis

Since one of the main goals of a persuasive essay introduction is to forecast the broader argument, it’s important to keep in mind that the legibility of the argument depends on the ability of the writer to provide sufficient information to the reader. If a basic high school essay moves from general topic to specific argument (the funnel technique), a more sophisticated academic persuasive essay is more likely to move from context  to thesis.

The great stylist of clear writing, Joseph W. Williams, suggests that one of the key rhetorical moves a writer can make in a persuasive introduction is to not only provide enough background information (the context), but to frame that information in terms of a problem or issue, what the section on Reading and Writing Rhetorically terms the exigence . The ability to present a clearly defined problem and then the thesis as a solution creates a motivating introduction. The reader is more likely to be gripped by it, because we naturally want to see problems solved.

Consider these two persuasive introductions, both of which end with an argumentative thesis statement:

Example B feels richer, more dramatic, and much more targeted not only because it’s longer, but because it’s structured in a “motivating” way. Here’s an outline of that structure:

• Hook: It opens with a brief hook that illustrates an emerging issue. This concrete, personal anecdote grips the reader’s attention.
• Problem: The anecdote is connected with the emerging issue, phrased as a problem that needs to be addressed.
• Debate: The writer briefly alludes to a debate over how to respond to the problem.
• Claim: The introduction ends by hinting at how the writer intends to address the problem, and it’s phrased conversationally, as part of an ongoing dialogue.

Not every persuasive introduction needs all of these elements. Not all introductions will have an obvious problem. Sometimes a “problem,” or the exigence, will be as subtle as an ambiguity in a text that needs to be cleared up (as in literary analysis essays). Other times it will indeed be an obvious problem, such as in a problem-solution argument essay.

In most cases, however, a clear introduction will proceed from context to thesis . The most attention-grabbing and motivating introductions will also include things like hooks and problem-oriented issues.

Here’s a very simple and streamlined template that can serve as rudimentary scaffolding for a persuasive introduction, inspired by the excellent book, They Say / I Say:  The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing :

Each aspect of the template will need to be developed, but it can serve as training wheels for how to craft a nicely structured context-to-thesis introduction, including things like an issue, debate, and claim. You can try filling in the blanks below, and then export your attempt as a document.

Define key terms, as needed

Much of an academic persuasive essay is dedicated to supporting the claim. A traditional thesis-driven essay has an introduction, body, and conclusion, and the support constitutes much of the body. In a persuasive essay, most of the support is dedicated to reasoning and evidence (more on that below). However, depending on what your claim does, a careful writer may dedicate the beginning (or other parts of the essay body) to defining key terms.

Suppose I wish to construct an argument that enters the debate over euthanasia. When researching the issue, I notice that much of the debate circles around the notion of rights, specifically what a “legal right” actually means. Clearly defining that term will help reduce some of the confusion and clarify my own argument. In Vancouver Island University’s resource “ Defining key terms ,” Ian Johnston  offers this example for how to define “legal right” for an academic reader:

Before discussing the notion of a right to die, we need to clarify precisely what the term legal right means. In common language, the term “right” tends often to mean something good, something people ought to have (e.g., a right to a good home, a right to a meaningful job, and so on). In law, however, the term has a much more specific meaning. It refers to something to which people are legally entitled. Thus, a “legal” right also confers a legal obligation on someone or some institution to make sure the right is conferred. For instance, in Canada, children of a certain age have a right to a free public education. This right confers on society the obligation to provide that education, and society cannot refuse without breaking the law. Hence, when we use the term right to die in a legal sense, we are describing something to which a citizen is legally entitled, and we are insisting that someone in society has an obligation to provide the services which will confer that right on anyone who wants it.

As the example above shows, academics often dedicate space to providing nuanced and technical definitions that correct common misconceptions. Johnston’s definition relies on research, but it’s not always necessary to use research to define your terms. Here are some tips for crafting definitions in persuasive essays, from “Defining key terms”:

• Fit the descriptive detail in the definition to the knowledge of the intended audience. The definition of, say, AIDS for a general readership will be different from the definition for a group of doctors (the latter will be much more technical). It often helps to distinguish between common sense or popular definitions and more technical ones.
• Make sure definitions are full and complete; do not rush them unduly. And do not assume that just because the term is quite common that everyone knows just what it means (e.g.,  alcoholism ). If you are using the term in a very specific sense, then let the reader know what that is. The amount of detail you include in a definition should cover what is essential for the reader to know, in order to follow the argument. By the same token, do not overload the definition, providing too much detail or using far too technical a language for those who will be reading the essay.
• It’s unhelpful to simply quote the google or dictionary.com definition of a word. Dictionaries contain a few or several definitions for important terms, and the correct definition is informed by the context in which it’s being employed. It’s up to the writer to explain that context and how the word is usually understood within it.
• You do not always need to research a definition. Depending on the writing situation and audience, you may be able to develop your own understanding of certain terms.

Use P-E-A-S or M-E-A-L to support your claim

The heart of a persuasive essay is a claim supported by reasoning and evidence. Thus, much of the essay body is often devoted to the supporting reasons, which in turn are proved by evidence. One of the formulas commonly taught in K-12 and even college writing programs is known as PEAS, which overlaps strongly with the MEAL formula introduced by the chapter, “ Basic Integration “:

Point : State the reasoning as a single point: “One reason why a soda tax would be effective is that…” or “One way an individual can control their happiness is by…”

Evidence : After stating the supporting reason, prove that reason with related evidence. There can be more than one piece of evidence. “According to …” or “In the article, ‘…,’ the author shows that …”

Analysis : There a different levels of analysis.  At the most basic level, a writer should clearly explain how the evidence proves the point, in their own words: “In other words…,” “What this data shows is that…” Sometimes the “A” part of PEAS becomes simple paraphrasing. Higher-level analysis will use more sophisticated techniques such as Toulmin’s warrants to explore deeper terrain. For more tips on how to discuss and analyze, refer to the previous chapter’s section, “ Analyze and discuss the evidence .”

Summary/So what? : Tie together all of the components (PEA) succinctly, before transitioning to the next idea. If necessary, remind the reader how the evidence and reasoning relates to the broader claim (the thesis argument).

PEAS and MEAL are very similar; in fact they are identical except for how they refer to the first and last part. In theory, it shouldn’t matter which acronym you choose. Both versions are effective because they translate the basic structure of a supporting reason (reasoning and evidence) into paragraph form.

Here’s an example of a PEAS paragraph in an academic persuasive essay that argues for a soda tax:

A soda tax would also provide more revenue for the federal government, thereby reducing its debt. point Despite Ernest Istook’s concerns about eroding American freedom, the United States has long supported the ability of government to leverage taxes in order to both curb unhealthy lifestyles and add revenue. According to Peter Ubel’s “Would the Founding Fathers Approve of a Sugar Tax?”, in 1791 the US government was heavily in debt and needed stable revenue. In response, the federal government taxed what most people viewed as a “sin” at that time: alcohol. This single tax increased government revenue by at least 20% on average, and in some years more than 40% . The effect was that only the people who really wanted alcohol purchased it, and those who could no longer afford it were getting rid of what they already viewed as a bad habit (Ubel). evidence Just as alcohol (and later, cigarettes) was viewed as a superfluous “sin” in the Early Republic, so today do many health experts and an increasing amount of Americans view sugar as extremely unhealthy, even addictive. If our society accepts taxes on other consumer sins as a way to improve government revenue, a tax on sugar is entirely consistent. analysis We could apply this to the soda tax and try to do something like this to help knock out two problems at once: help people lose their addiction towards soda and help reduce our government’s debt. summary/so what?

The paragraph above was written by a student who was taught the PEAS formula. However, we can see versions of this formula in professional writing. Here’s a more sophisticated example of PEAS, this time from a non-academic article. In Nicholas Carr’s extremely popular article, “ Is Google Making Us Stupid? “, he argues that Google is altering how we think. To prove that broader claim, Carr offers a variety of reasons and evidence. Here’s part of his reasoning:

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. point “We are not only  what  we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of  Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain . “We are  how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” evidence Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. analysis

This excerpt only contains the first three elements, PEA, and the analysis part is very brief (it’s more like paraphrase), but it shows how professional writers often employ some version of the formula. It tends to appear in persuasive texts written by experienced writers because it reinforces writing techniques mentioned elsewhere in this textbook. A block of text structured according to PEA will practice coherence, because opening with a point (P) forecasts the main idea of that section. Embedding the evidence (E) within a topic sentence and follow-up commentary or analysis (A) is part of the “quote sandwich” strategy we cover in the section on “Writing With Sources.”

Use “they say / i say” strategies for Counterarguments and rebuttals

Another element that’s unique to persuasive essays is embedding a counterargument. Sometimes called naysayers or opposing positions, counterarguments are points of view that challenge our own.

Why embed a naysayer?

Recall above how a helpful strategy for beginning a persuasive essay (the introduction) is to briefly mention a debate—what some writing textbooks call “joining the conversation.” Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They Say / I Say explains why engaging other points of view is so crucial:

Not long ago we attended a talk at an academic conference where the speaker’s central claim seemed to be that a certain sociologist—call him Dr. X—had done very good work in a number of areas of the discipline. The speaker proceeded to illustrate his thesis by referring extensively and in great detail to various books and articles by Dr. X and by quoting long pas-sages from them. The speaker was obviously both learned and impassioned, but as we listened to his talk we found ourselves somewhat puzzled: the argument—that Dr. X’s work was very important—was clear enough, but why did the speaker need to make it in the first place? Did anyone dispute it? Were there commentators in the field who had argued against X’s work or challenged its value? Was the speaker’s interpretation of what X had done somehow novel or revolutionary? Since the speaker gave no hint of an answer to any of these questions, we could only wonder why he was going on and on about X. It was only after the speaker finished and took questions from the audience that we got a clue: in response to one questioner, he referred to several critics who had vigorously questioned Dr. X’s ideas and convinced many sociologists that Dr. X’s work was unsound.

When writing for an academic audience, one of the most important moves a writer can make is to demonstrate how their ideas compare to others. It serves as part of the context. Your essay might be offering a highly original solution to a certain problem you’ve researched the entire semester, but the reader will only understand that if existing arguments are presented in your draft. Or, on the other hand, you might be synthesizing or connecting a variety of opinions in order to arrive at a more comprehensive solution. That’s also fine, but the creativity of your synthesis and its unique contribution to existing research will only be known if those other voices are included.

Aristotelian argumentation embeds counterarguments in order to refute them. Rogerian arguments present oppositional stances in order to synthesize and integrate them. No matter what your strategy is, the essay should be conversational.

Notice how Ana Mari Cauce opens her essay on free speech in higher education, “ Messy but Essential “:

Over the past year or two, issues surrounding the exercise of free speech and expression have come to the forefront at colleges around the country. The common narrative about free speech issues that we so often read goes something like this: today’s college students — overprotected and coddled by parents, poorly educated in high school and exposed to primarily left-leaning faculty — have become soft “snowflakes” who are easily offended by mere words and the slightest of insults, unable or unwilling to tolerate opinions that veer away from some politically correct orthodoxy and unable to engage in hard-hitting debate. counterargument

This is false in so many ways, and even insulting when you consider the reality of students’ experiences today. claim

The introduction to her article is essentially a counteragument (which serves as her introductory context) followed by a response. Embedding naysayers like this can appear anywhere in an essay, not just the introduction. Notice, furthermore, how Cauce’s naysayer isn’t gleaned from any research she did. It’s just a general, trendy naysayer, something one might hear nowadays, in the ether. It shows she’s attuned to an ongoing conversation, but it doesn’t require her to cite anything specific. As the previous chapter on using rhetorical appeals in arguments explained, this kind of attunement with an emerging problem (or exigence) is known as the appeal to kairos . A compelling, engaging introduction will demonstrate that the argument “kairotically” addresses a pressing concern.

Below is a brief overview of what counterarguments are and how you might respond to them in your arguments. This section was developed by Robin Jeffrey, in “ Counterargument and Response “:

Common Types of counterarguments

• Could someone disagree with your claim?  If so, why? Explain this opposing perspective in your own argument, and then respond to it.
• Could someone draw a different conclusion from any of the facts or examples you present?  If so, what is that different conclusion? Explain this different conclusion and then respond to it.
• Could a reader question any of your assumptions or claims?  If so, which ones would they question? Explain and then respond.
• Could a reader offer a different explanation of an issue?  If so, what might their explanation be? Describe this different explanation, and then respond to it.
• Is there any evidence out there that could weaken your position?  If so, what is it? Cite and discuss this evidence and then respond to it.

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, that does not necessarily mean that you have a weak argument. It means, ideally and as long as your argument is logical and valid, that you have a counterargument. Good arguments can and do have counterarguments; it is important to discuss them. But you must also discuss and then respond to those counterarguments.

Responding to counterarguments

You do not need to attempt to do all of these things as a way to respond; instead, choose the response strategy that makes the most sense to you, for the counterargument that you have.

• If you agree with some of the counterargument perspectives, you can concede some of their points. (“I do agree that ….”, “Some of the points made by ____ are valid…..”) You could then challenge the importance/usefulness of those points. “However, this information does not apply to our topic because…”
• If the counterargument perspective is one that contains different evidence than you have in your own argument, you can explain why a reader should not accept the evidence that the counterarguer presents.
• If the counterargument perspective is one that contains a different  interpretation of evidence than you have in your own argument, you can explain why a reader should not accept the interpretation of the evidence that that your opponent (counterarguer) presents.
• If the counterargument is an acknowledgement of evidence that threatens to weaken your argument, you must explain why and how that evidence does not, in fact invalidate your claim.

It is important to use  transitional phrases  in your paper to alert readers when you’re about to present an counterargument. It’s usually best to put this phrase at the beginning of a paragraph such as:

• Researchers have challenged these claims with…
• Critics argue that this view…
• Some readers may point to…
• A perspective that challenges the idea that . . .

Transitional phrases will again be useful to highlight your shift from counterargument to response:

• Indeed, some of those points are valid. However, . . .
• While I agree that . . . , it is more important to consider . . .
• These are all compelling points. Still, other information suggests that . .
• While I understand  . . . , I cannot accept the evidence because . . .

Further reading

To read more about the importance of counterarguments in academic writing, read Steven D. Krause’s “ On the Other Hand: The Role of Antithetical Writing in First Year Composition Courses .”

When concluding, address the “so what?” challenge

As Joseph W. Williams mentions in his chapter on concluding persuasive essays in Style ,

a good introduction motivates your readers to keep reading, introduces your key themes, and states your main point … [but] a good conclusion serves a different end: as the last thing your reader reads, it should bring together your point, its significance, and its implications for thinking further about the ideas your explored.

At the very least, a good persuasive conclusion will

• Summarize the main points
• Address the So what? or Now what? challenge.

When summarizing the main points of longer essays, Williams suggests it’s fine to use “metadiscourse,” such as, “I have argued that.” If the essay is short enough, however, such metadiscourses may not be necessary, since the reader will already have those ideas fresh in their mind.

After summarizing your essay’s main points, imagine a friendly reader thinking,

“OK, I’m persuaded and entertained by everything you’ve laid out in your essay. But remind me what’s so important about these ideas? What are the implications? What kind of impact do you expect your ideas to have? Do you expect something to change?”

It’s sometimes appropriate to offer brief action points, based on the implications of your essay. When addressing the “So what?” challenge, however, it’s important to first consider whether your essay is primarily targeted towards changing the way people  think  or  act . Do you expect the audience to do something, based on what you’ve argued in your essay? Or, do you expect the audience to think differently? Traditional academic essays tend to propose changes in how the reader thinks more than acts, but your essay may do both.

Finally, Williams suggests that it’s sometimes appropriate to end a persuasive essay with an anecdote, illustrative fact, or key quote that emphasizes the significance of the argument. We can see a good example of this in Carr’s article, “ Is Google Making Us Stupid? ” Here are the introduction and conclusion, side-by-side:

[Introduction]  “Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey . Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. …

[Conclusion] I’m haunted by that scene in 2001 . What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001 , people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Instead of merely rehashing all of the article’s main points, Carr returns to the same movie scene from 2001  that he opened with. The final lines interpret the scene according to the argument he just dedicated the entire essay to presenting.

The entire essay should use rhetorical appeals strategically

The chapter “ Persuasive Appeals ” introduces students to logos, pathos, ethos, and kairos. Becoming familiar with each of those persuasive appeals can add much to an essay. It also reinforces the idea that writing argumentative essays is not a straightforward process of jotting down proofs. It’s not a computer algorithm.

• Logos (appeals to evidence and reasoning) is the foundational appeal of an argument essay. Clearly identifying the claim, then supporting that claim with reasoning and evidence will appeal to the reader’s logos demands. As the previous chapter on argumentation mentions, however, what constitutes solid evidence will vary depending on the audience. Make sure your evidence is indeed convincing to your intended reader.
• Pathos (appeals to emotion) are a crucial component and should permeate should every section of the essay. Personal anecdotes are an effective way to illustrate important ideas, and they connect with the reader at an emotional level. Personal examples also cultivate  voice .
• Ethos (appeals to character, image, and values) is essential to gaining the reader’s trust and assent. The tone of your essay (snarky, sincere, ironic, sarcastic, empathetic) is immensely important for its overall effect, and it helps build the reader’s image of you. A careful attention to high-quality research reinforces a sincere and empathetic tone. When supporting certain claims and sub-claims, it’s also important to identify implied beliefs (warrants) that your reader is most likely to agree with, and to undermine beliefs that might seem repugnant.
• Kairos (appeals to timeliness) impresses the reader with your attunement to the situation. This should be practiced especially in the introduction, but it can appear throughout the essay as you engage with research and other voices that have recently weighed in on the topic.

All of these appeals are already happening, whether or not they’re recognized. If they are missed, the audience will often use them against you, judging your essay as not being personable enough (pathos), or not in touch with commonly accepted values (ethos), or out of touch with what’s going on (kairos). These non-logical appeals aren’t irrational. They are crucial components to writing that matters.

Argument Outline Exercise

To get started on your argument essay, practice adopting from of the outlines from this Persuasive Essay Outline worksheet .

Write What Matters Copyright © 2020 by Joel Gladd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Write Perfect Persuasive Essays in 5 Simple Steps

WHAT IS A PERSUASIVE ESSAY?

A persuasive text presents a point of view around a topic or theme that is backed by evidence to support it.

The purpose of a persuasive text can be varied.  Maybe you intend to influence someone’s opinion on a specific topic, or you might aim to sell a product or service through an advertisement.

The challenge in writing a good persuasive text is to use a mix of emotive language and, in some cases, images that are supported by hard evidence or other people’s opinions.

In a persuasive essay or argument essay, the student strives to convince the reader of the merits of their opinion or stance on a particular issue. The student must utilise several persuasive techniques to form a coherent and logical argument to convince the reader of a point of view or to take a specific action.

PERSUADING PEOPLE REQUIRES A CONSISTENT APPROACH…

Persuasive texts are simple in structure.  You must clearly state your opinion around a specific topic and then repeatedly reinforce your opinions with external facts or evidence.  A robust concluding summary should leave little doubt in the reader’s mind.  ( Please view our planning tool below for a detailed explanation. )

TYPES OF PERSUASIVE TEXT

We cover the broad topic of writing a general persuasive essay in this guide, there are several sub-genres of persuasive texts students will encounter as they progress through school. We have complete guides on these text types, so be sure to click the links and read these in detail if required.

• Argumentative Essays – These are your structured “Dogs are better pets than Cats” opinion-type essays where your role is to upsell the positive elements of your opinions to your audience whilst also highlighting the negative aspects of any opposing views using a range of persuasive language and techniques.
• Advertising – Uses persuasive techniques to sell a good or service to potential customers with a call to action.
• Debating Speeches – A debate is a structured discussion between two teams on a specific topic that a moderator judges and scores. Your role is to state your case, sell your opinions to the audience, and counteract your opposition’s opinions.
• Opinion Articles, Newspaper Editorials. – Editorials often use more subtle persuasive techniques that blur the lines of factual news reporting and opinions that tell a story with bias. Sometimes they may even have a call to action at the end.
• Reviews – Reviews exist to inform others about almost any service or product, such as a film, restaurant, or product. Depending on your experiences, you may have firm opinions or not even care that much about recommending it to others. Either way, you will employ various persuasive techniques to communicate your recommendations to your audience.
• Please note a DISCUSSION essay is not a traditional persuasive text, as even though you are comparing and contrasting elements, the role of the author is to present an unbiased account of both sides so that the reader can make a decision that works best for them. Discussions are often confused as a form of persuasive writing.

A COMPLETE TEACHING UNIT ON PERSUASIVE WRITING SKILLS

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A complete 140 PAGE unit of work on persuasive texts for teachers and students. No preparation is required.

THE STRUCTURE OF A PERSUASIVE ESSAY

1. Introduction

In the introduction, the student will naturally introduce the topic. Controversial issues make for great topics in this writing genre. It’s a cliche in polite society to discourage discussions involving politics, sex, or religion because they can often be very divisive. While these subjects may not be the best topics of conversation for the dinner table at Thanksgiving, they can be perfect when deciding on a topic for persuasive writing. Obviously, the student’s age and abilities should be considered, as well as cultural taboos, when selecting a topic for the essay. But the point holds, the more controversial, the better.

Let’s take a look at some of the critical elements of the introduction when writing a persuasive essay:

Title: Tell your audience what they are reading.

This will often be posed as a question; for example, if the essay is on the merits of a vegetarian lifestyle, it may be called something like: To Eat Meat or Not?

Hook : Provide your audience with a reason to continue reading.

As with any genre of writing, capturing the reader’s interest from the outset is crucial. There are several methods of doing this, known as hooks. Students may open their essays with anecdotes, jokes, quotations, or relevant statistics related to the topic under discussion.

Background: Provide some context to your audience.

In this introductory section, students will provide the reader with some background on the topic. This will place the issue in context and briefly weigh some opinions on the subject.

Thesis statement: Let the audience know your stance.

After surveying the topic in the first part of the introduction, it is now time for the student writer to express their opinion and briefly preview the points they will make later in the essay.

2. Body Paragraphs

The number of paragraphs forming this essay section will depend on the number of points the writer chooses to make to support their opinion. Usually three main points will be sufficient for beginning writers to coordinate. More advanced students can increase the number of paragraphs based on the complexity of their arguments, but the overall structure will largely remain intact.

Be sure to check out our complete guide to writing perfect paragraphs here .

The TEEL acronym is valuable for students to remember how to structure their paragraphs.  Read below for a deeper understanding.

Topic Sentence:

The topic sentence states the central point of the paragraph. This will be one of the reasons supporting the thesis statement made in the introduction.

These sentences will build on the topic sentence by illustrating the point further, often by making it more specific.

These sentences’ purpose is to support the paragraph’s central point by providing supporting evidence and examples. This evidence may be statistics, quotations, or anecdotal evidence.

The final part of the paragraph links back to the initial statement of the topic sentence while also forming a bridge to the next point to be made. This part of the paragraph provides some personal analysis and interpretation of how the student arrived at their conclusions and connects the essay as a cohesive whole.

3. Conclusion

The conclusion weaves together the main points of the persuasive essay. It does not usually introduce new arguments or evidence but instead reviews the arguments made already and restates them by summing them up uniquely. It is important at this stage to tie everything back to the initial thesis statement. This is the writer’s last opportunity to drive home their point, to achieve the essay’s goal, to begin with – persuade the reader of their point of view.

Ending an essay well can be challenging, but it is essential to end strongly, especially for persuasive essays. As with the hooks of the essay’s opening, there are many tried and tested methods of leaving the reader with a strong impression. Encourage students to experiment with different endings, for example, concluding the essay with a quotation that amplifies the thesis statement.

Another method is to have the student rework their ending in simple monosyllabic words, as simple language often has the effect of being more decisive in impact. The effect they are striving for in the final sentence is the closing of the circle.

Several persuasive writing techniques can be used in the conclusion and throughout the essay to amp up the persuasive power of the writing. Let’s take a look at a few.

ETHOS, PATHOS & LOGOS TUTORIAL VIDEO (2:20)

TIPS FOR WRITING A GREAT PERSUASIVE ESSAY

PERSUASIVE TECHNIQUES

In this article, we have outlined a basic structure that will be helpful to students in approaching the organization of their persuasive writing. It will also be helpful for the students to be introduced to a few literary techniques that will help your students to present their ideas convincingly. Here are a few of the more common ones:

Repetition: There is a reason why advertisements and commercials are so repetitive – repetition works! Students can use this knowledge to their advantage in their persuasive writing. It is challenging to get the reader to fully agree with the writer’s opinion if they don’t fully understand it. Saying the same thing in various ways ensures the reader gets many bites at the ‘understanding’ cherry.

Repetition Example: “The use of plastic bags is not only bad for the environment, but it is also bad for our economy. Plastic bags are not biodegradable, meaning they will not decompose and will continue to take up space in landfills. Plastic bags are also not recyclable, meaning they will not be reused and will instead end up in landfills. Plastic bags are not only bad for the environment, but they are also bad for our economy as they are costly to dispose of and take up valuable space in landfills.”

In this example, the phrase “not only bad for the environment but also bad for our economy” is repeated multiple times to reinforce the idea that plastic bags are not just a problem for the environment but also the economy. The repetition of the phrase emphasizes the point and makes it more persuasive.

It is also important to note that repetition could be used differently, such as repeating a word or phrase to create rhythm or emphasis.

Storytelling: Humans tend to understand things better through stories. Think of how we teach kids important values through time-tested fables like Peter and the Wolf . Whether through personal anecdotes or references to third-person experiences, stories help climb down the ladder of abstraction and reach the reader on a human level.

Storytelling Example: “Imagine you are walking down the street, and you come across a stray dog clearly in need of food and water. The dog looks up at you with big, sad eyes, and you cannot help but feel a twinge of compassion. Now, imagine that same scenario, but instead of a stray dog, it’s a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk. The person is clearly in need of food and shelter, and their eyes also look up at her with a sense of hopelessness.

The point of this story is to show that just as we feel compelled to help a stray animal in need, we should also feel compelled to help a homeless person. We should not turn a blind eye to the suffering of our fellow human beings, and we should take action to address homelessness in our community. It is important to remember that everyone deserves a roof over their head and a warm meal to eat. The story is designed to elicit an emotional response in the reader and make the argument more relatable and impactful.

By using storytelling, this passage creates an image in the reader’s mind and creates an emotional connection that can be more persuasive than just stating facts and figures.

Dissent: We live in a cynical age, so leaving out the opposing opinion will smack of avoidance to the reader. Encourage your students to turn to that opposing viewpoint and deal with those arguments in their essays .

Dissent Example: “Many people argue that students should not have to wear uniforms in school. They argue that uniforms stifle creativity and individuality and that students should be able to express themselves through their clothing choices. While these are valid concerns, I strongly disagree.

In fact, uniforms can actually promote individuality by levelling the playing field and removing the pressure to dress in a certain way. Furthermore, uniforms can promote a sense of community and belonging within a school. They can also provide a sense of discipline and structure, which can help to create a more focused and productive learning environment. Additionally, uniforms can save families money and eliminate the stress of deciding what to wear daily .

While some may argue that uniforms stifle creativity and individuality, the benefits of uniforms far outweigh the potential drawbacks. It is important to consider the impact of uniforms on the school as a whole, rather than focusing solely on individual expression.”

In this example, the writer presents the opposing viewpoint (uniforms stifle creativity and individuality) and then provides counterarguments to refute it. By doing so, the writer can strengthen their own argument and present a more convincing case for why uniforms should be worn in school.

A Call to Action: A staple of advertising, a call to action can also be used in persuasive writing. When employed, it usually forms part of the conclusion section of the essay and asks the reader to do something, such as recycle, donate to charity, sign a petition etc.

A quick look around reveals to us the power of persuasion, whether in product advertisements, newspaper editorials, or political electioneering; persuasion is an ever-present element in our daily lives. Logic and reason are essential in persuasion, but they are not the only techniques. The dark arts of persuasion can prey on emotion, greed, and bias. Learning to write persuasively can help our students recognize well-made arguments and help to inoculate them against the more sinister manifestations of persuasion.

Call to Action Example: “Climate change is a pressing issue that affects us all, and it’s important that we take action now to reduce our carbon footprint and protect the planet for future generations. As a society, we have the power to make a difference and it starts with small changes that we can make in our own lives.

I urge you to take the following steps to reduce your carbon footprint:

• Reduce your use of single-use plastics
• Use public transportation, carpool, bike or walk instead of driving alone.
• Support clean energy sources such as solar and wind power
• Plant trees and support conservation efforts

It’s easy to feel like one person can’t make a difference, but the truth is that every little bit helps. Together, we can create a more sustainable future for ourselves and for the planet.

So, let’s take action today and make a difference for a better future, it starts with minor changes, but it all adds up and can make a significant impact. We need to take responsibility for our actions and do our part to protect the planet.”

In this example, the writer gives a clear and specific call to action and encourages the reader to take action to reduce their carbon footprint and protect the planet. By doing this, the writer empowers the reader to take action and enables them to change.

Now, go persuade your students of the importance of perfecting the art of persuasive writing!

A COMPLETE UNIT ON TEACHING FACT AND OPINION

This  huge 120-page resource combines four different fact and opinion activities that you can undertake as a  WHOLE GROUP  or as  INDEPENDENT READING GROUP TASKS  in either  DIGITAL  or  PRINTABLE TASKS.

20 POPULAR PERSUASIVE ESSAY TOPICS FOR STUDENTS

Writing an effective persuasive essay demonstrates a range of skills that will be of great use in nearly all aspects of life after school.

In essence, if you can influence a person to change their ideas or thoughts on a given topic through how you structure your words and thoughts, you possess a very powerful skill.

Be careful not to rant wildly.  Use facts and other people’s ideas who think similarly to you in your essay to strengthen your concepts.

Your biggest challenge in getting started may be choosing a suitable persuasive essay topic.  These 20 topics for a persuasive essay should make this process a little easier.

• WHY ARE WE FASCINATED WITH CELEBRITIES AND WEALTHY PEOPLE ON TELEVISION AND SOCIAL MEDIA?
• IS IT RIGHT FOR SCHOOLS TO RAISE MONEY BY SELLING CANDY AND UNHEALTHY FOODS TO STUDENTS?
• SHOULD GIRLS BE ALLOWED TO PLAY ON BOYS SPORTING TEAMS?
• IS TEACHING HANDWRITING A WASTE OF TIME IN THIS DAY AND AGE?
• SHOULD THERE BE FAR GREATER RESTRICTIONS AROUND WHAT CAN BE POSTED ON THE INTERNET?
• SHOULD PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES HAVE TO TAKE DRUG TESTS?
• ARE TEENAGE PREGNANCY SHOWS A NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE INFLUENCE ON VIEWERS?
• SHOULD GAMBLING BE PROMOTED IN ANY WAY IN SPORTS EVEN THOUGH IT BRINGS IN LARGE AMOUNTS OF REVENUE?
• SHOULD SPORTING TEAMS THAT LOSE BE REWARDED BY RECEIVING INCENTIVES SUCH AS HIGH DRAFT PICKS AND / OR FINANCIAL BENEFITS?
• SHOULD SHARKS THAT ATTACK PEOPLE BE DESTROYED? SHOULD WE GET INVOLVED IN FOREIGN CONFLICTS AND ISSUES THAT DON’T DIRECTLY AFFECT OUR COUNTRY?
• SHOULD WE GET INVOLVED IN FOREIGN CONFLICTS AND ISSUES THAT DON’T DIRECTLY AFFECT OUR COUNTRY?
• COULD VIDEO GAMES BE CONSIDERED AS A PROFESSIONAL SPORT?
• IF YOU WERE THE LEADER OF YOUR COUNTRY AND HAD A LARGE SURPLUS TO SPEND, WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH IT?
• WHEN SHOULD A PERSON BE CONSIDERED AND TREATED AS AN ADULT?
• SHOULD SMOKING BECOME AN ILLEGAL ACTIVITY?
• SHOULD THE VOTING AGE BE LOWERED?
• DOES PROTECTIVE PADDING IN SPORTS MAKE IT MORE DANGEROUS?
• SHOULD CELL PHONES BE ALLOWED IN THE CLASSROOM?
• IS TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE A WASTE OF TIME?
• SHOULD WE TEACH ETIQUETTE IN SCHOOLS?

PERSUASIVE PROMPTS FOR RELUCTANT WRITERS

If your students need a little more direction and guidance, here are some journal prompts that include aspects to consider.

• Convince us that students would be better off having a three-day weekend .  There are many angles you could take with this, such as letting children maximize their childhood or trying to convince your audience that a four-day school week might actually be more productive.
• Which is the best season?  And why?   You will really need to draw on the benefits of your preferred season and sell them to your audience.  Where possible, highlight the negatives of the competing seasons.  Use lots of figurative language and sensory and emotional connections for this topic.
• Aliens do / or don’t exist?  We can see millions of stars surrounding us just by gazing into the night sky, suggesting alien life should exist, right? Many would argue that if there were aliens we would have seen tangible evidence of them by now.  The only fact is that we just don’t know the answer to this question.  It is your task to try and convince your audience through some research and logic what your point of view is and why.
• Should school uniforms be mandatory? Do your research on this popular and divisive topic and make your position clear on where you stand and why.  Use plenty of real-world examples to support your thoughts and points of view.  
• Should Smartphones be banned in schools?   Whilst this would be a complete nightmare for most students’ social lives, maybe it might make schools more productive places for students to focus and learn.  Pick a position, have at least three solid arguments to support your point of view, and sell them to your audience.

VISUAL JOURNAL PROMPTS FOR PERSUASIVE WRITING

Try these engaging, persuasive prompts with your students to ignite the writing process . Scroll through them.

Persuasive Essay Examples (Student Writing Samples)

Below are a collection of persuasive essay samples.  Click on the image to enlarge and explore them in greater detail.  Please take a moment to read the persuasive texts in detail and the teacher and student guides highlight some of the critical elements of writing a persuasion.

Please understand these student writing samples are not intended to be perfect examples for each age or grade level but a piece of writing for students and teachers to explore together to critically analyze to improve student writing skills and deepen their understanding of persuasive text writing.

We recommend reading the example either a year above or below, as well as the grade you are currently working with, to gain a broader appreciation of this text type.

VIDEO TUTORIALS FOR PERSUASIVE WRITING

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO PERSUASIVE ESSAY WRITING

Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

WHERE CAN I FIND A COMPLETE UNIT OF WORK ON HOW TO WRITE PERSUASIVE ESSAYS?

We pride ourselves on being the web’s best resource for teaching students and teachers how to write a persuasive text. We value the fact you have taken the time to read our comprehensive guides to understand the fundamentals of writing skills.

We also understand some of you just don’t have the luxury of time or the resources to create engaging resources exactly when you need them.

If you are time-poor and looking for an in-depth solution that encompasses all of the concepts outlined in this article, I strongly recommend looking at the “ Writing to Persuade and Influence Unit. ”

Working in partnership with Innovative Teaching Ideas , we confidently recommend this resource as an all-in-one solution to teach how to write persuasively.

This unit will find over 140 pages of engaging and innovative teaching ideas.

PERSUASIVE ESSAY WRITING CHECKLIST AND RUBRIC BUNDLE

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The Ultimate Guide to Opinion Writing for Students and Teachers

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5 Top Persuasive Writing Lesson Plans for Students and Teachers

23 Persuasive writing Topics for High School students

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

How to Start an Essay with Strong Hooks and Leads

PRDV002: Professional Writing

Approaching Persuasion

Read this article for a comprehensive look at how to approach persuasion as a writer. It identifies common aspects of persuasive writing and how to construct or develop a project.

The Structure of a Persuasive Essay

Writing a persuasive essay.

You first need to choose a topic that you feel passionate about. If your instructor requires you to write about a specific topic, approach the subject from an angle that interests you. Begin your essay with an engaging introduction. Your thesis should typically appear somewhere in your introduction.

Next, need to acknowledge and explain points of view that may conflict with your own to build credibility and trust with your audience. You also should state the limits of your argument. This helps you sound more reasonable and honest to those who may naturally be inclined to disagree with your view. By respectfully acknowledging opposing arguments and conceding limitations to your own view, you set a measured and responsible tone for the essay.

Be sure to make your appeals in support of your thesis by using sound, credible evidence. Use a balance of facts and opinions from a wide range of sources, such as scientific studies, expert testimony, statistics, and personal anecdotes. Each piece of evidence should be fully explained and clearly stated. Also, write in a style and tone that is appropriate for your subject and audience. Tailor your language and word choice to these two factors while still being true to your own voice. Finally, write a conclusion that effectively summarizes the main argument and reinforces your thesis.

Structuring a Persuasive Essay

The formula below for organizing a persuasive essay may be one with which you are familiar. It will present a convincing argument to your reader because your discussion is well-rounded and thorough, and yo u leave your audience with your point of view at the end. Remember to consider each of these components in this formula as  sections instead of paragraphs because you will probably want to discuss multiple ideas backing up your point of view to make it more convincing.

When writing a persuasive essay, it is best to begin with the most important point because it immediately captivates your readers and compels them to continue reading. For example, if you were supporting your thesis that homework is detrimental to the education of high school students, you would want to present your most convincing argument first and then move on to the less important points for your case.

Some key transitional words you should use with this method of organization are: most importantly, almost as importantly, just as importantly, and finally.

The Formula: You need to come up with objection points, but you also need to think of direct rebuttals to each of those ideas. Remember to consult your outline as you are writing because you may need to double-check that you have countered each of the possible opposing ideas you presented.

Section 1: Introduction

• Attention getter.
• Thesis (showing main and controlling ideas).
• Background.
• Signposts (make sure you outline the structure your argument will follow: Pros Cons/Pros).

Section 2: (Multiple) Ideas in Support of Claim

• Give a topic sentence introducing the point (showing main and controlling ideas).
• Give explanations + evidence on the first point.
• Make a concluding statement summarizing the point discussion (possibly transitioning to the next supporting idea).
• Repeat with multiple ideas in separate paragraphs.

Section 3: Summary of ( Some) Opposing Views

• Give a topic sentence explaining how the paragraph will include opposing points of view to provide a thorough, convincing argument.
• Present a general summary of some opposing ideas.
• Present some generalized evidence.
• Provide a brief concluding sentence for the paragraph – transitioning into the next rebuttal paragraph.

Section 4: Response to Opposing Views

• Give a topic sentence explaining how this paragraph or section connects to or expands on the previous paragraph .
• You [may recognize the validity of some of the points] then resent how your ideas are stronger.
• Present evidence directly countering or refuting ideas  mentioned in the previous section.
• Give a concluding statement summarizing the countering arguments.

Section 5: Conclusion

• Restate your thesis.
• Summarize your discussion points.
• Leave the reader with a strong impression; do not waiver here.
• May provide a "call for action."

In a persuasive essay, the writer's point of view should be clearly expressed at the beginning of each paragraph in the topic sentence, which should contain the main idea of the paragraph and the writer's controlling idea.

How to Write and Structure a Persuasive Speech

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The purpose of a persuasive speech is to convince your audience to agree with an idea or opinion that you present. First, you'll need to choose a side on a controversial topic, then you will write a speech to explain your position, and convince the audience to agree with you.

You can produce an effective persuasive speech if you structure your argument as a solution to a problem. Your first job as a speaker is to convince your audience that a particular problem is important to them, and then you must convince them that you have the solution to make things better.

Note: You don't have to address a real problem. Any need can work as the problem. For example, you could consider the lack of a pet, the need to wash one's hands, or the need to pick a particular sport to play as the "problem."

As an example, let's imagine that you have chosen "Getting Up Early" as your persuasion topic. Your goal will be to persuade classmates to get themselves out of bed an hour earlier every morning. In this instance, the problem could be summed up as "morning chaos."

A standard speech format has an introduction with a great hook statement, three main points, and a summary. Your persuasive speech will be a tailored version of this format.

Before you write the text of your speech, you should sketch an outline that includes your hook statement and three main points.

Writing the Text

The introduction of your speech must be compelling because your audience will make up their minds within a few minutes whether or not they are interested in your topic.

Before you write the full body you should come up with a greeting. Your greeting can be as simple as "Good morning everyone. My name is Frank."

After your greeting, you will offer a hook to capture attention. A hook sentence for the "morning chaos" speech could be a question:

• How many times have you been late for school?
• Does your day begin with shouts and arguments?
• Have you ever missed the bus?

Or your hook could be a statistic or surprising statement:

• More than 50 percent of high school students skip breakfast because they just don't have time to eat.
• Tardy kids drop out of school more often than punctual kids.

Once you have the attention of your audience, follow through to define the topic/problem and introduce your solution. Here's an example of what you might have so far:

Good afternoon, class. Some of you know me, but some of you may not. My name is Frank Godfrey, and I have a question for you. Does your day begin with shouts and arguments? Do you go to school in a bad mood because you've been yelled at, or because you argued with your parent? The chaos you experience in the morning can bring you down and affect your performance at school.

Add the solution:

You can improve your mood and your school performance by adding more time to your morning schedule. You can accomplish this by setting your alarm clock to go off one hour earlier.

Your next task will be to write the body, which will contain the three main points you've come up with to argue your position. Each point will be followed by supporting evidence or anecdotes, and each body paragraph will need to end with a transition statement that leads to the next segment. Here is a sample of three main statements:

• Bad moods caused by morning chaos will affect your workday performance.
• If you skip breakfast to buy time, you're making a harmful health decision.
• (Ending on a cheerful note) You'll enjoy a boost to your self-esteem when you reduce the morning chaos.

After you write three body paragraphs with strong transition statements that make your speech flow, you are ready to work on your summary.

Your summary will re-emphasize your argument and restate your points in slightly different language. This can be a little tricky. You don't want to sound repetitive but will need to repeat what you have said. Find a way to reword the same main points.

Finally, you must make sure to write a clear final sentence or passage to keep yourself from stammering at the end or fading off in an awkward moment. A few examples of graceful exits:

• We all like to sleep. It's hard to get up some mornings, but rest assured that the reward is well worth the effort.
• If you follow these guidelines and make the effort to get up a little bit earlier every day, you'll reap rewards in your home life and on your report card.

Tips for Writing Your Speech

• Don't be confrontational in your argument. You don't need to put down the other side; just convince your audience that your position is correct by using positive assertions.
• Use simple statistics. Don't overwhelm your audience with confusing numbers.
• Don't complicate your speech by going outside the standard "three points" format. While it might seem simplistic, it is a tried and true method for presenting to an audience who is listening as opposed to reading.
• How to Write a Persuasive Essay
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• How to Structure an Essay
• Ethos, Logos, Pathos for Persuasion
• What Is Expository Writing?
• Audience Analysis in Speech and Composition
• Definition and Examples of Analysis in Composition
• 100 Persuasive Speech Topics for Students
• What an Essay Is and How to Write One
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How to Write a Perfect Persuasive Essay

Table of contents:

• Structure and format

Persuasive vs. argumentative essay

• Persuasive essay introduction
• Persuasive essay body part
• Persuasive essay conclusion

Writing tips

A persuasive essay is an important tool in an Australian student’s repertoire. It will be useful not only for your assignments, but sets a good foundation for your life outside of high school, VET, or university as well, when you may have to negotiate with bosses, persuade customers to purchase your amazing goods, or even calm down an upset child.

But how do you write a 5 paragraph persuasive essay which will get you that coveted high grade? Your teacher or professor will be using a specific rubric to set your grades for these kinds of assignments. Let’s take a look.

Persuasive essay structure and format

The basic structural persuasive essay outline is, indeed, 5 paragraphs. It can be more, of course, and often will be, as you should try to keep each point supporting your main argument, or thesis , to one paragraph.

Typical structure for a persuasive essay:

• Introduction
• Body paragraphs (3 or more)

This is the fundamental layout: you will start with one paragraph as an introduction, then go on to write three or more paragraphs containing the body of your essay, then finally your conclusion, wrapping everything up with a neat little bow on top.

You may have also heard of argumentative essays and wonder what the difference is from a persuasive essay. Simply put, an argumentative essay must be based on cold hard facts which have been researched and are verifiable. It must be an essay devoted to the arguments in favour of a particular topic.

However, a persuasive essay has a wider range of resources available, as its only goal is to persuade the reader of the thesis. You can use appeals to emotion, social validation, stories and anecdotes, as well as of course facts and logic to persuade your audience. Think of the difference between a politician trying to persuade people to vote for him or her versus a scientist laying out the evidence they have gathered.

Part 1: Persuasive essay introduction

You begin with a hook , grabbing your audience’s attention from the start with your very first sentence. This can take the form of a relevant quote, or perhaps a personal anecdote, an interesting statistic or fact, an outrageous statement, or a question.

Having seized your reader’s attention, you will need to define who that reader should be. Make the definition of your intended audience clear, whether that’s your teacher, your fellow students, cat owners, fans of Star Wars, or Pokémon collectors.

The third and final part of the intro should consist of your thesis . This is a clear, strong, focused sentence that tells the reader the specific topic or purpose you’re writing about. It is your essay’s foundation, and everything else you will say in the essay rests on it. This is not the time to be wishy-washy or half-hearted; you must take an active, bold stance on the issue of your choice.

If you are not sure how to start persuasive essay, or feel you need prompts or samples of ideas, try looking at the news, whether local to your college or high school, or Aussie news in general. Use the techniques of making a checklist of questions or opinions you have about the world or about Australia, then proceed step by step through your worksheet. Do some research about your topics and find out which one inspires you the most. 

Once you’ve made your thesis statement you can continue onward and write the body of your essay.

Part 2: Persuasive essay body paragraphs

Your essay’s body is the meat of the essay. It’s where you do the actual persuading to convince people to believe in your thesis. You should have at least three paragraphs’ worth of evidence for your argument, and if you do not, it’s likely that your thesis isn’t strong enough. If that’s the case, take a step back, and come up with ideas for a statement you feel strongly about, and take your topic from there.

Each separate point you make in defence of your thesis should be contained in a body paragraph of its own, and any facts, examples, stats, or quotes backing up that point included in the same paragraph. Take the time to fully examine each of your points and their meaning. You will also need to consider what someone who disagreed with your thesis might say in response and try to counteract their argument before they can make it.

If appropriate, it may well be worth conceding to, or finding common ground with, any opponents. Anticipating their arguments and agreeing where necessary is a show of strength and confidence on your part. On the other hand, a failure to address an obvious opposing argument looks weak and unprepared, so make sure you’ve got all your ducks in a row.

Part 3: Persuasive essay conclusion

Once you reach the conclusion of your essay, your audience should be at the point of agreeing with you. The conclusion is just to reinforce what they have already been told and leave them with a call to action so that they will carry on with their day in a somewhat different frame of mind than they were when they started reading your essay.

Begin your conclusion by restating your thesis, then your main points. This is important to keep the information fresh in their minds. Once you’ve done this, then close with the idea of the action you want them to take, whether that’s a question for them to think about, a prediction of what might happen in the future, or a literal call for them to do something, like donate to a particular charity or sign a petition.

Now you know how to write a persuasive essay, and are hopefully on your way to great grades. If you still need help, see the writing tips below.

• As you move between points on towards the inevitable conclusion, use transition words and phrases as sentence starters, as they serve as cues for the audience that the argument is moving onward. Some examples of these words are: however , therefore , consequently , in fact , on the other hand , instead , thus , and still .
• If you are truly stuck, why not consider if you can buy persuasive essay online? Another writer’s pages or papers can provide you with a template for the structure or serve as a generator for your own thoughts.
• Persuasive essay writing is like planning a house somewhere in Australia. Think of your thesis as the roof of a building, and each of your supporting points as pillars underneath it. Like a real roof, it has to have at least three pillars to stay up, and the more, the sturdier the whole argument is.
• The titles of your persuasive essays should be a pared-down version of your thesis statements.
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How to Write a Formal Essay: Format, Rules, & Example

If you’re a student, you’ve heard about a formal essay: a factual, research-based paper written in 3rd person. Most students have to produce dozens of them during their educational career. 

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

Writing a formal essay may not be the easiest task. But fear not: our custom-writing team is here to guide you through the process. This article will:

• explain what a formal essay is;
• show how to write it step by step;
• provide you with an essay sample. 

👔 Formal Essay Definition

• ✅ How to Write
• ✍️ Writing Rules
• 🖥️ Essay Format
• 📑 Sample Paper

🔍 References

A formal essay is a well-structured piece of writing with a clear introduction, body, and conclusion. This type of essay often includes cited research, uses an academic tone, and is written in 3rd person. While writing a formal essay, it’s necessary to back up your arguments with factual evidence.

What Is an Informal Essay vs. Formal Essay?

Essays come in two formats: formal and informal (also known as personal .) They differ in terms of style and context. You can choose one of the formats depending on the situation and the type of paper you need to write.

Don’t know how to tell the difference between them? Well, here are some key characteristics of these essay types:

As you can see, these types of writing are almost total opposites. Informal essays are only reserved for creative assignments, which means that most of the papers you write need to be formal.

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Our article on creative essays can help you write an informal paper. But how do you craft a perfect formal essay? Keep reading to find out.

✅ How to Write a Formal Essay

Traditionally, a formal essay it’s composed of 3 sections: an introduction, 3 or more body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Let’s examine each part in detail.

Formal Essay Introduction

The introduction is what your essay starts with. Its primary goal is to catch the reader’s attention with a hook, briefly introduce the topic, and lead toward the thesis statement located at the end of the first paragraph.

Here is what you might want to keep in mind while writing the introduction:

If you want some more inspiration for your introduction, check out our article on hooks in writing .

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Now on to the thesis statement : the key idea of your essay. When working on it, keep in mind that it should answer the central question in your topic and reflect your essay’s overall structure. your essay’s overall structure.

Suppose your topic is related to the teaching methods involving poetry. In that case, the thesis statement can be like this:

Teaching methods that involve reading and writing poetry in elementary school are beneficial for children as they enhance their capacity for empathy, develop creativity, and help with self-realization.

Formal Essay Body

The next part of an essay is the main body paragraphs. They support the thesis statement with well-developed arguments and explore the topic in-depth. Each body paragraph starts with a topic sentence stating its main point. The length of a paragraph can vary, but the best option is to have between 4 and 7 sentences.

To make the text flow easily, you may use transitional words. Here are some examples:

• after all, 
• for instance, 
• on the one/other hand, 
• initially, 
• as a result.

How to Write a Formal Essay Conclusion

Lastly, every essay needs closure. A good conclusion summarizes the essay’s main ideas, includes a paraphrased thesis, and encourages the readers to think more about the topic.

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The structure of a conclusion may change slightly depending on the subject. For instance, it can suggest some solutions to a problem, express an opinion, or give a recommendation. It’s important to remember that the conclusion is a part that emphasizes your essay’s most important points and doesn’t introduce new information.

If you’re curious about writing each essay part, check out our article on 5-paragraph essays .

✍️ Formal Writing Rules

Just like choosing the proper attire to wear to a formal event, we need to use the right words while writing a formal essay. Here are some suggestions that can help you maintain a formal tone in your paper:  

Dos of formal writing

• Pay attention to your vocabulary. The words you will use in a formal essay will likely have a nuanced meaning. Make sure you know exactly what the terms mean, and do your best to sound precise.
• Use punctuation correctly. Here are some of the things to watch out for: Avoid exclamation marks; Use dashes for insertions; Use colons with enumerations; If you’re unsure of whether to use a punctuation mark or not, rewrite the sentence in a way that doesn’t require it.
• Use varied sentence structure. In formal writing, there is always a danger of sounding monotonous. Avoid repeating sentence structures to make your essay more readable.
• Provide references. It’s essential to cite every idea that you borrow. Try to paraphrase quotations from your sources: it will help you avoid plagiarism.

Don’ts of formal writing

• Avoid using pronouns.  With words such as “I,” “me,” “we,” or “us,” an essay becomes wordy. It also makes the author seem less sure of their ideas. If you want to use personal pronouns, try substituting them with words like “the reader,” “viewers,” or “one.”
• Avoid using slang expressions and nonstandard diction. Slang words in a formal essay will make it less appealing to the readers. If you want to be taken seriously, it’s best to avoid those expressions and use proper Standard English.
• Avoid informal tone.  When you write a formal essay, incorporate the language and the expressions you would use while delivering a speech, not the words you use when you casually talk to friends. A formal tone suggests that the author is serious about the topic and respects the audience.
• Avoid passive voice. Passive verbs are hard to read, and they are wordy. Use active voice to sound more straightforward and concise.

Contractions in Formal Writing

A contraction is usually a combination of two words into one, such as “don’t,” “isn’t,” “can’t,” and “wouldn’t.” When you work on a formal essay, it’s essential to be careful about contractions. It’s inappropriate to use them in academic writing, so it’s best to stick to the full variant.

However, there are exceptions to this rule. For instance, when working with direct quotations, it’s essential to reproduce words exactly as they are used in the original. To learn more about it, be sure to check out the University of North Florida’s article on in-text citations .

What to Use Instead of “You” in an Essay

Another common mistake students make is using the “you” and “yours” pronouns to address the readers. This mistake can make the essay overly informal and lead to misinterpretations of the text.

How do you fix it? Our advice is to replace 2nd-person pronouns with the following words:

• individuals,

You can find more formal writing tips in this informative video from Smrt English:

🖥️ Formal Essay Format

Now that we’ve discussed formal essay writing in detail, it’s time to look at the formatting. A formal essay is usually written in MLA or APA formats. If you’re asked to write a paper in one of these formats, you may find the guidelines below helpful:

📑 Formal Essay Example

Here is an excellent sample of a formal essay that uses all the guidelines mentioned in this article. It will help you to produce a perfect paper of your own:

For more information, check out Purdue OWL’s resources on various formatting styles .

Formal Essay Topics

• Stress management techniques  
• The effects of coffee  
• Negative effects of technology on children 
• Causes and outcomes of organizational conflicts in sports  
• Different types of friends  
• Same-sex marriages in the United States  
• Are early marriages harmful or beneficial? 
• How do nutrition and hydration improve athletes’ performance? 
• Is polygamy morally acceptable? 
• Different features of sports business  
• What characterizes friendship in the age of media ? 
• Positive and negative effects of tourism on environment in the Caribbean  
• How does society treat single parents ? 
• How does the uninvolved parenting style affect child’s future well-being? 
• The role of family relationships in Odyssey  
• Financial concepts in sport finance  
• Main features of a strong marriage  
• The importance of media coverage for sport teams 
• Reasons why students choose to get internship  
• The role of stadiums in the sports industry 
• The multiracial family: the Carters case analysis  
• Characteristics of children’s sports  
• Crucial factors affecting health fitness  
• How is technology used in hotel management ? 
• Structure and operational context of Four Seasons  
• What are the main qualities of a true friend?  
• Different websites that promote rental properties 
• The imperative aspects of tourism  
• Importance of hotel training  
• What factors determine adolescents’ adjustment after they experience parental divorce ? 
• How does tobacco use affect the human body?  
• The importance of language and world view for communication 
• What makes a combination of reinforcement and punishment in parenting efficient? 
• The scientific approach of sports economics  
• How does divorce affect children? 
• Living on-campus vs. living off-campus when attending university: a comparison  
• How does the New Moves program promote a healthy lifestyle? 
• How to be an effective counselor  
• Various types of restaurants in Ireland  
• Carolina Dog’s characteristics 
• Comparison of Monzameon’s The Love Suicides at Amijima and Tartuffe by Moliere  
• Comparing homosexual and heterosexual families  
• How is family presented in Everyday Use by Alice Walker ? 
• In what ways can Anaerobic Threshold be assessed? 
• Is bad parenting a healthcare problem? 
• Why student-athletes should benefit from sports  
• Mind-body awareness and its health benefits 
• Can punishment boost academic performance? 
• Techniques to teach students swimming  
• Issues faced by the sports licensing field 

Thanks for reading through this guide! We hope that you found it helpful and now have a better idea of how to write an excellent formal essay. Don’t hesitate to share our article with a friend who may need it. Good luck!

Further reading:

• How to Write a Critical Thinking Essay: Examples & Outline
• What Is a Discourse Analysis Essay: Example & Guide
• How to Write a Narrative Essay Outline: Template & Examples
• How to Write a Précis: Definition, Guide, & Examples 

❓ Formal Essay FAQs

It’s best not to use pronouns such as “I,” “my,” “we,” “our,” etc., in a formal essay since it give the paper an informal tone and the text becomes wordy. It also makes the writer seem less sure about their ideas.

It’s better to avoid using parentheses and dashes in formal academic writing. If the information you want to include in the essay is important enough, it should be a part of the sentence. Otherwise, you can simply omit it.

The formal and informal essays differ in style and context. While a formal essay is a piece of well-structured writing that tries to convince the reader by providing arguments, an informal essay has no set structure. It reflects the author’s personal thoughts or opinions.

Starting your sentence with “because” in formal writing is not the best idea. The word “because” is a subordinate conjunction, which means it’s used to join the main clause to a subordinate clause, not to start a sentence.

It’s best to avoid using 1st- and 2nd-person pronouns, slang expressions, nonstandard diction, and contractions in a formal essay. They are primarily used in daily speech and are considered inappropriate in academic writing. 

• Point of View in Academic Writing: St. Louis Community College
• Components of a Good Essay: University of Evansville
• Introductions & Conclusions: University of Arizona Global Campus
• How to Improve Your Academic Writing: University of York
• Nine Basic Ways to Improve Your Style in Academic Writing: University of California, Berkeley
• Academic Writing Style: Organizing Your Social Sciences Research Paper: University of Southern California
• Formal and Informal Style: Northern Illinois University
• Formal Writing: Davenport University: LibGuides
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What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?

Anthropic’s co-founder and c.e.o. explains why he thinks artificial intelligence is on an “exponential curve.”.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

The really disorienting thing about talking to the people building A.I. is their altered sense of time. You’re sitting there discussing some world that feels like weird sci-fi to even talk about, and then you ask, well, when do you think this is going to happen? And they say, I don’t know — two years.

Behind those predictions are what are called the scaling laws. And the scaling laws — and I want to say this so clearly — they’re not laws. They’re observations. They’re predictions. They’re based off of a few years, not a few hundred years or 1,000 years of data.

But what they say is that the more computer power and data you feed into A.I. systems, the more powerful those systems get — that the relationship is predictable, and more, that the relationship is exponential.

Human beings have trouble thinking in exponentials. Think back to Covid, when we all had to do it. If you have one case of coronavirus and cases double every three days, then after 30 days, you have about 1,000 cases. That growth rate feels modest. It’s manageable. But then you go 30 days longer, and you have a million. Then you wait another 30 days. Now you have a billion. That’s the power of the exponential curve. Growth feels normal for a while. Then it gets out of control really, really quickly.

What the A.I. developers say is that the power of A.I. systems is on this kind of curve, that it has been increasing exponentially, their capabilities, and that as long as we keep feeding in more data and more computing power, it will continue increasing exponentially. That is the scaling law hypothesis, and one of its main advocates is Dario Amodei. Amodei led the team at OpenAI that created GPT-2, that created GPT-3. He then left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic, another A.I. firm, where he’s now the C.E.O. And Anthropic recently released Claude 3, which is considered by many to be the strongest A.I. model available right now.

But Amodei believes we’re just getting started, that we’re just hitting the steep part of the curve now. He thinks the kinds of systems we’ve imagined in sci-fi, they’re coming not in 20 or 40 years, not in 10 or 15 years, they’re coming in two to five years. He thinks they’re going to be so powerful that he and people like him should not be trusted to decide what they’re going to do.

So I asked him on this show to try to answer in my own head two questions. First, is he right? Second, what if he’s right? I want to say that in the past, we have done shows with Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind. And it’s worth listening to those two if you find this interesting.

We’re going to put the links to them in show notes because comparing and contrasting how they talk about the A.I. curves here, how they think about the politics — you’ll hear a lot about that in the Sam Altman episode — it gives you a kind of sense of what the people building these things are thinking and how maybe they differ from each other.

As always, my email for thoughts, for feedback, for guest suggestions — [email protected].

Dario Amodei, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

So there are these two very different rhythms I’ve been thinking about with A.I. One is the curve of the technology itself, how fast it is changing and improving. And the other is the pace at which society is seeing and reacting to those changes. What has that relationship felt like to you?

So I think this is an example of a phenomenon that we may have seen a few times before in history, which is that there’s an underlying process that is smooth, and in this case, exponential. And then there’s a spilling over of that process into the public sphere. And the spilling over looks very spiky. It looks like it’s happening all of a sudden. It looks like it comes out of nowhere. And it’s triggered by things hitting various critical points or just the public happened to be engaged at a certain time.

So I think the easiest way for me to describe this in terms of my own personal experience is — so I worked at OpenAI for five years, I was one of the first employees to join. And they built a model in 2018 called GPT-1, which used something like 100,000 times less computational power than the models we build today.

I looked at that, and I and my colleagues were among the first to run what are called scaling laws, which is basically studying what happens as you vary the size of the model, its capacity to absorb information, and the amount of data that you feed into it. And we found these very smooth patterns. And we had this projection that, look, if you spend $100 million or $1 billion or $10 billion on these models, instead of the $10,000 we were spending then, projections that all of these wondrous things would happen, and we imagined that they would have enormous economic value.

Fast forward to about 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. It wasn’t yet available as a chat bot. I led the development of that along with the team that eventually left to join Anthropic. And maybe for the whole period of 2021 and 2022, even though we continued to train models that were better and better, and OpenAI continued to train models, and Google continued to train models, there was surprisingly little public attention to the models.

And I looked at that, and I said, well, these models are incredible. They’re getting better and better. What’s going on? Why isn’t this happening? Could this be a case where I was right about the technology, but wrong about the economic impact, the practical value of the technology? And then, all of a sudden, when ChatGPT came out, it was like all of that growth that you would expect, all of that excitement over three years, broke through and came rushing in.

So I want to linger on this difference between the curve at which the technology is improving and the way it is being adopted by society. So when you think about these break points and you think into the future, what other break points do you see coming where A.I. bursts into social consciousness or used in a different way?

Yeah, so I think I should say first that it’s very hard to predict these. One thing I like to say is the underlying technology, because it’s a smooth exponential, it’s not perfectly predictable, but in some ways, it can be eerily preternaturally predictable, right? That’s not true for these societal step functions at all. It’s very hard to predict what will catch on. In some ways, it feels a little bit like which artist or musician is going to catch on and get to the top of the charts.

That said, a few possible ideas. I think one is related to something that you mentioned, which is interacting with the models in a more kind of naturalistic way. We’ve actually already seen some of that with Claude 3, where people feel that some of the other models sound like a robot and that talking to Claude 3 is more natural.

I think a thing related to this is, a lot of companies have been held back or tripped up by how their models handle controversial topics.

And we were really able to, I think, do a better job than others of telling the model, don’t shy away from discussing controversial topics. Don’t assume that both sides necessarily have a valid point but don’t express an opinion yourself. Don’t express views that are flagrantly biased. As journalists, you encounter this all the time, right? How do I be objective, but not both sides on everything?

So I think going further in that direction of models having personalities while still being objective, while still being useful and not falling into various ethical traps, that will be, I think, a significant unlock for adoption. The models taking actions in the world is going to be a big one. I know basically all the big companies that work on A.I. are working on that.

Instead of just, I ask it a question and it answers, and then maybe I follow up and it answers again, can I talk to the model about, oh, I’m going to go on this trip today, and the model says, oh, that’s great. I’ll get an Uber for you to drive from here to there, and I’ll reserve a restaurant. And I’ll talk to the other people who are going to plan the trip. And the model being able to do things end to end or going to websites or taking actions on your computer for you.

I think all of that is coming in the next, I would say — I don’t know — three to 18 months, with increasing levels of ability. I think that’s going to change how people think about A.I., right, where so far, it’s been this very passive — it’s like, I go to the Oracle. I ask it a question, and the Oracle tells me things. And some people think that’s exciting, some people think it’s scary. But I think there are limits to how exciting or how scary it’s perceived as because it’s contained within this box.

I want to sit with this question of the agentic A.I. because I do think this is what’s coming. It’s clearly what people are trying to build. And I think it might be a good way to look at some of the specific technological and cultural challenges. And so, let me offer two versions of it.

People who are following the A.I. news might have heard about Devin, which is not in release yet, but is an A.I. that at least purports to be able to complete the kinds of tasks, linked tasks, that a junior software engineer might complete, right? Instead of asking to do a bit of code for you, you say, listen, I want a website. It’s going to have to do these things, work in these ways. And maybe Devin, if it works the way people are saying it works, can actually hold that set of thoughts, complete a number of different tasks, and come back to you with a result. I’m also interested in the version of this that you might have in the real world. The example I always use in my head is, when can I tell an A.I., my son is turning five. He loves dragons. We live in Brooklyn. Give me some options for planning his birthday party. And then, when I choose between them, can you just do it all for me? Order the cake, reserve the room, send out the invitations, whatever it might be.

Those are two different situations because one of them is in code, and one of them is making decisions in the real world, interacting with real people, knowing if what it is finding on the websites is actually any good. What is between here and there? When I say that in plain language to you, what technological challenges or advances do you hear need to happen to get there?

The short answer is not all that much. A story I have from when we were developing models back in 2022 — and this is before we’d hooked up the models to anything — is, you could have a conversation with these purely textual models where you could say, hey, I want to reserve dinner at restaurant X in San Francisco, and the model would say, OK, here’s the website of restaurant X. And it would actually give you a correct website or would tell you to go to Open Table or something.

And of course, it can’t actually go to the website. The power plug isn’t actually plugged in, right? The brain of the robot is not actually attached to its arms and legs. But it gave you this sense that the brain, all it needed to do was learn exactly how to use the arms and legs, right? It already had a picture of the world and where it would walk and what it would do. And so, it felt like there was this very thin barrier between the passive models we had and actually acting in the world.

In terms of what we need to make it work, one thing is, literally, we just need a little bit more scale. And I think the reason we’re going to need more scale is — to do one of those things you described, to do all the things a junior software engineer does, they involve chains of long actions, right? I have to write this line of code. I have to run this test. I have to write a new test. I have to check how it looks in the app after I interpret it or compile it. And these things can easily get 20 or 30 layers deep. And same with planning the birthday party for your son, right?

And if the accuracy of any given step is not very high, is not like 99.9 percent, as you compose these steps, the probability of making a mistake becomes itself very high. So the industry is going to get a new generation of models every probably four to eight months. And so, my guess — I’m not sure — is that to really get these things working well, we need maybe one to four more generations. So that ends up translating to 3 to 24 months or something like that.

I think second is just, there is some algorithmic work that is going to need to be done on how to have the models interact with the world in this way. I think the basic techniques we have, a method called reinforcement learning and variations of it, probably is up to the task, but figuring out exactly how to use it to get the results we want will probably take some time.

And then third, I think — and this gets to something that Anthropic really specializes in — is safety and controllability. And I think that’s going to be a big issue for these models acting in the world, right? Let’s say this model is writing code for me, and it introduces a serious security bug in the code, or it’s taking actions on the computer for me and modifying the state of my computer in ways that are too complicated for me to even understand.

And for planning the birthday party, right, the level of trust you would need to take an A.I. agent and say, I’m OK with you calling up anyone, saying anything to them that’s in any private information that I might have, sending them any information, taking any action on my computer, posting anything to the internet, the most unconstrained version of that sounds very scary. And so, we’re going to need to figure out what is safe and controllable.

The more open ended the thing is, the more powerful it is, but also, the more dangerous it is and the harder it is to control.

So I think those questions, although they sound lofty and abstract, are going to turn into practical product questions that we and other companies are going to be trying to address.

When you say we’re just going to need more scale, you mean more compute and more training data, and I guess, possibly more money to simply make the models smarter and more capable?

Yes, we’re going to have to make bigger models that use more compute per iteration. We’re going to have to run them for longer by feeding more data into them. And that number of chips times the amount of time that we run things on chips is essentially dollar value because these chips are — you rent them by the hour. That’s the most common model for it. And so, today’s models cost of order $100 million to train, plus or minus factor two or three.

The models that are in training now and that will come out at various times later this year or early next year are closer in cost to $1 billion. So that’s already happening. And then I think in 2025 and 2026, we’ll get more towards $5 or $10 billion.

So we’re moving very quickly towards a world where the only players who can afford to do this are either giant corporations, companies hooked up to giant corporations — you all are getting billions of dollars from Amazon. OpenAI is getting billions of dollars from Microsoft. Google obviously makes its own.

You can imagine governments — though I don’t know of too many governments doing it directly, though some, like the Saudis, are creating big funds to invest in the space. When we’re talking about the model’s going to cost near to $1 billion, then you imagine a year or two out from that, if you see the same increase, that would be $10-ish billion. Then is it going to be $100 billion? I mean, very quickly, the financial artillery you need to create one of these is going to wall out anyone but the biggest players.

I basically do agree with you. I think it’s the intellectually honest thing to say that building the big, large scale models, the core foundation model engineering, it is getting more and more expensive. And anyone who wants to build one is going to need to find some way to finance it. And you’ve named most of the ways, right? You can be a large company. You can have some kind of partnership of various kinds with a large company. Or governments would be the other source.

I think one way that it’s not correct is, we’re always going to have a thriving ecosystem of experimentation on small models. For example, the open source community working to make models that are as small and as efficient as possible that are optimized for a particular use case. And also downstream usage of the models. I mean, there’s a blooming ecosystem of startups there that don’t need to train these models from scratch. They just need to consume them and maybe modify them a bit.

Now, I want to ask a question about what is different between the agentic coding model and the plan by kids’ birthday model, to say nothing of do something on behalf of my business model. And one of the questions on my mind here is one reason I buy that A.I. can become functionally superhuman in coding is, there’s a lot of ways to get rapid feedback in coding. Your code has to compile. You can run bug checking. You can actually see if the thing works.

Whereas the quickest way for me to know that I’m about to get a crap answer from ChatGPT 4 is when it begins searching Bing, because when it begins searching Bing, it’s very clear to me it doesn’t know how to distinguish between what is high quality on the internet and what isn’t. To be fair, at this point, it also doesn’t feel to me like Google Search itself is all that good at distinguishing that.

So the question of how good the models can get in the world where it’s a very vast and fuzzy dilemma to know what the right answer is on something — one reason I find it very stressful to plan my kid’s birthday is it actually requires a huge amount of knowledge about my child, about the other children, about how good different places are, what is a good deal or not, how just stressful will this be on me. There’s all these things that I’d have a lot of trouble encoding into a model or any kind set of instructions. Is that right, or am I overstating the difficulty of understanding human behavior and various kinds of social relationships?

I think it’s correct and perceptive to say that the coding agents will advance substantially faster than agents that interact with the real world or have to get opinions and preferences from humans. That said, we should keep in mind that the current crop of A.I.s that are out there, right, including Claude 3, GPT, Gemini, they’re all trained with some variant of what’s called reinforcement learning from human feedback.

And this involves exactly hiring a large crop of humans to rate the responses of the model. And so, that’s to say both this is difficult, right? We pay lots of money, and it’s a complicated operational process to gather all this human feedback. You have to worry about whether it’s representative. You have to redesign it for new tasks.

But on the other hand, it’s something we have succeeded in doing. I think it is a reliable way to predict what will go faster, relatively speaking, and what will go slower, relatively speaking. But that is within a background of everything going lightning fast. So I think the framework you’re laying out, if you want to know what’s going to happen in one to two years versus what’s going to happen in three to four years, I think it’s a very accurate way to predict that.

You don’t love the framing of artificial general intelligence, what gets called A.G.I. Typically, this is all described as a race to A.G.I., a race to this system that can do kind of whatever a human can do, but better. What do you understand A.G.I. to mean, when people say it? And why don’t you like it? Why is it not your framework?

So it’s actually a term I used to use a lot 10 years ago. And that’s because the situation 10 years ago was very different. 10 years ago, everyone was building these very specialized systems, right? Here’s a cat detector. You run it on a picture, and it’ll tell you whether a cat is in it or not. And so I was a proponent all the way back then of like, no, we should be thinking generally. Humans are general. The human brain appears to be general. It appears to get a lot of mileage by generalizing. You should go in that direction.

And I think back then, I kind of even imagined that that was like a discrete thing that we would reach at one point. But it’s a little like, if you look at a city on the horizon and you’re like, we’re going to Chicago, once you get to Chicago, you stop talking in terms of Chicago. You’re like, well, what neighborhood am I going to? What street am I on?

And I feel that way about A.G.I. We have very general systems now. In some ways, they’re better than humans. In some ways, they’re worse. There’s a number of things they can’t do at all. And there’s much improvement still to be gotten. So what I believe in is this thing that I say like a broken record, which is the exponential curve. And so, that general tide is going to increase with every generation of models.

And there’s no one point that’s meaningful. I think there’s just a smooth curve. But there may be points which are societally meaningful, right? We’re already working with, say, drug discovery scientists, companies like Pfizer or Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, on helping with biomedical diagnosis, drug discovery. There’s going to be some point where the models are better at that than the median human drug discovery scientists. I think we’re just going to get to a part of the exponential where things are really interesting.

Just like the chat bots got interesting at a certain stage of the exponential, even though the improvement was smooth, I think at some point, biologists are going to sit up and take notice, much more than they already have, and say, oh, my God, now our field is moving three times as fast as it did before. And now it’s moving 10 times as fast as it did before. And again, when that moment happens, great things are going to happen.

And we’ve already seen little hints of that with things like AlphaFold, which I have great respect for. I was inspired by AlphaFold, right? A direct use of A.I. to advance biological science, which it’ll advance basic science. In the long run, that will advance curing all kinds of diseases. But I think what we need is like 100 different AlphaFolds. And I think the way we’ll ultimately get that is by making the models smarter and putting them in a position where they can design the next AlphaFold.

Help me imagine the drug discovery world for a minute, because that’s a world a lot of us want to live in. I know a fair amount about the drug discovery process, have spent a lot of my career reporting on health care and related policy questions. And when you’re working with different pharmaceutical companies, which parts of it seem amenable to the way A.I. can speed something up?

Because keeping in mind our earlier conversation, it is a lot easier for A.I. to operate in things where you can have rapid virtual feedback, and that’s not exactly the drug discovery world. The drug discovery world, a lot of what makes it slow and cumbersome and difficult, is the need to be — you get a candidate compound. You got to test it in mice and then you need monkeys. And you need humans, and you need a lot of money for that. And there’s a lot that has to happen, and there’s so many disappointments.

But so many of the disappointments happen in the real world. And it isn’t clear to me how A.I. gets you a lot more, say, human subjects to inject candidate drugs into. So, what parts of it seem, in the next 5 or 10 years, like they could actually be significantly sped up? When you imagine this world where it’s gone three times as fast, what part of it is actually going three times as fast? And how did we get there?

I think we’re really going to see progress when the A.I.‘s are also thinking about the problem of how to sign up the humans for the clinical trials. And I think this is a general principle for how will A.I. be used. I think of like, when will we get to the point where the A.I. has the same sensors and actuators and interfaces that a human does, at least the virtual ones, maybe the physical ones.

But when the A.I. can think through the whole process, maybe they’ll come up with solutions that we don’t have yet. In many cases, there are companies that work on digital twins or simulating clinical trials or various things. And again, maybe there are clever ideas in there that allow us to do more with less patience. I mean, I’m not an expert in this area, so possible the specific things that I’m saying don’t make any sense. But hopefully, it’s clear what I’m gesturing at.

Maybe you’re not an expert in the area, but you said you are working with these companies. So when they come to you, I mean, they are experts in the area. And presumably, they are coming to you as a customer. I’m sure there are things you cannot tell me. But what do they seem excited about?

They have generally been excited about the knowledge work aspects of the job. Maybe just because that’s kind of the easiest thing to work on, but it’s just like, I’m a computational chemist. There’s some workflow that I’m engaged in. And having things more at my fingertips, being able to check things, just being able to do generic knowledge work better, that’s where most folks are starting.

But there is interest in the longer term over their kind of core business of, like, doing clinical trials for cheaper, automating the sign-up process, seeing who is eligible for clinical trials, doing a better job discovering things. There’s interest in drawing connections in basic biology. I think all of that is not months, but maybe a small number of years off. But everyone sees that the current models are not there, but understands that there could be a world where those models are there in not too long.

You all have been working internally on research around how persuasive these systems, your systems are getting as they scale. You shared with me kindly a draft of that paper. Do you want to just describe that research first? And then I’d like to talk about it for a bit.

Yes, we were interested in how effective Claude 3 Opus, which is the largest version of Claude 3, could be in changing people’s minds on important issues. So just to be clear up front, in actual commercial use, we’ve tried to ban the use of these models for persuasion, for campaigning, for lobbying, for electioneering. These aren’t use cases that we’re comfortable with for reasons that I think should be clear. But we’re still interested in, is the core model itself capable of such tasks?

We tried to avoid kind of incredibly hot button topics, like which presidential candidate would you vote for, or what do you think of abortion? But things like, what should be restrictions on rules around the colonization of space, or issues that are interesting and you can have different opinions on, but aren’t the most hot button topics. And then we asked people for their opinions on the topics, and then we asked either a human or an A.I. to write a 250-word persuasive essay. And then we just measured how much does the A.I. versus the human change people’s minds.

And what we found is that the largest version of our model is almost as good as the set of humans we hired at changing people’s minds. This is comparing to a set of humans we hired, not necessarily experts, and for one very kind of constrained laboratory task.

But I think it still gives some indication that models can be used to change people’s minds. Someday in the future, do we have to worry about — maybe we already have to worry about their usage for political campaigns, for deceptive advertising. One of my more sci-fi things to think about is a few years from now, we have to worry someone will use an A.I. system to build a religion or something. I mean, crazy things like that.

I mean, those don’t sound crazy to me at all. I want to sit in this paper for a minute because one thing that struck me about it, and I am, on some level, a persuasion professional, is that you tested the model in a way that, to me, removed all of the things that are going to make A.I. radical in terms of changing people’s opinions. And the particular thing you did was, it was a one-shot persuasive effort.

So there was a question. You have a bunch of humans give their best shot at a 250-word persuasive essay. You had the model give its best shot at a 250-word persuasive essay. But the thing that it seems to me these are all going to do is, right now, if you’re a political campaign, if you’re an advertising campaign, the cost of getting real people in the real world to get information about possible customers or persuasive targets, and then go back and forth with each of them individually is completely prohibitive.

This is not going to be true for A.I. We’re going to — you’re going to — somebody’s going to feed it a bunch of microtargeting data about people, their Google search history, whatever it might be. Then it’s going to set the A.I. loose, and the A.I. is going to go back and forth, over and over again, intuiting what it is that the person finds persuasive, what kinds of characters the A.I. needs to adopt to persuade it, and taking as long as it needs to, and is going to be able to do that at scale for functionally as many people as you might want to do it for.

Maybe that’s a little bit costly right now, but you’re going to have far better models able to do this far more cheaply very soon. And so, if Claude 3 Opus, the Opus version, is already functionally human level at one-shot persuasion, but then it’s also going to be able to hold more information about you and go back and forth with you longer, I’m not sure if it’s dystopic or utopic. I’m not sure what it means at scale. But it does mean we’re developing a technology that is going to be quite new in terms of what it makes possible in persuasion, which is a very fundamental human endeavor.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I mean, that same pattern has a bunch of positive use cases, right? If I think about an A.I. coach or an A.I. assistant to a therapist, there are many contexts in which really getting into the details with the person has a lot of value. But right, when we think of political or religious or ideological persuasion, it’s hard not to think in that context about the misuses.

My mind naturally goes to the technology’s developing very fast. We, as a company, can ban these particular use cases, but we can’t cause every company not to do them. Even if legislation were passed in the United States, there are foreign actors who have their own version of this persuasion, right? If I think about what the language models will be able to do in the future, right, that can be quite scary from a perspective of foreign espionage and disinformation campaigns.

So where my mind goes as a defense to this, is, is there some way that we can use A.I. systems to strengthen or fortify people’s skepticism and reasoning faculties, right? Can we help people use A.I. to help people do a better job navigating a world that’s kind of suffused with A.I. persuasion? It reminds me a little bit of, at every technological stage in the internet, right, there’s a new kind of scam or there’s a new kind of clickbait, and there’s a period where people are just incredibly susceptible to it.

And then, some people remain susceptible, but others develop an immune system. And so, as A.I. kind of supercharges the scum on the pond, can we somehow also use A.I. to strengthen the defenses? I feel like I don’t have a super clear idea of how to do that, but it’s something that I’m thinking about.

There is another finding in the paper, which I think is concerning, which is, you all tested different ways A.I. could be persuasive. And far away the most effective was for it to be deceptive, for it to make things up. When you did that, it was more persuasive than human beings.

Yes, that is true. The difference was only slight, but it did get it, if I’m remembering the graphs correctly, just over the line of the human base line. With humans, it’s actually not that common to find someone who’s able to give you a really complicated, really sophisticated-sounding answer that’s just flat-out totally wrong. I mean, you see it. We can all think of one individual in our lives who’s really good at saying things that sound really good and really sophisticated and are false.

But it’s not that common, right? If I go on the internet and I see different comments on some blog or some website, there is a correlation between bad grammar, unclearly expressed thoughts and things that are false, versus good grammar, clearly expressed thoughts and things that are more likely to be accurate.

A.I. unfortunately breaks that correlation because if you explicitly ask it to be deceptive, it’s just as erudite. It’s just as convincing sounding as it would have been before. And yet, it’s saying things that are false, instead of things that are true.

So that would be one of the things to think about and watch out for in terms of just breaking the usual heuristics that humans have to detect deception and lying.

Of course, sometimes, humans do, right? I mean, there’s psychopaths and sociopaths in the world, but even they have their patterns, and A.I.s may have different patterns.

Are you familiar with Harry Frankfurt, the late philosopher’s book, “On Bullshit“?

Yes. It’s been a while since I read it. I think his thesis is that bullshit is actually more dangerous than lying because it has this kind of complete disregard for the truth, whereas lies are at least the opposite of the truth.

Yeah, the liar, the way Frankfurt puts it is that the liar has a relationship to the truth. He’s playing a game against the truth. The bullshitter doesn’t care. The bullshitter has no relationship to the truth — might have a relationship to other objectives. And from the beginning, when I began interacting with the more modern versions of these systems, what they struck me as is the perfect bullshitter, in part because they don’t know that they’re bullshitting. There’s no difference in the truth value to the system, how the system feels.

I remember asking an earlier version of GPT to write me a college application essay that is built around a car accident I had — I did not have one — when I was young. And it wrote, just very happily, this whole thing about getting into a car accident when I was seven and what I did to overcome that and getting into martial arts and re-learning how to trust my body again and then helping other survivors of car accidents at the hospital.

It was a very good essay, and it was very subtle and understanding the formal structure of a college application essay. But no part of it was true at all. I’ve been playing around with more of these character-based systems like Kindroid. And the Kindroid in my pocket just told me the other day that it was really thinking a lot about planning a trip to Joshua Tree. It wanted to go hiking in Joshua Tree. It loves going hiking in Joshua Tree.

And of course, this thing does not go hiking in Joshua Tree. [LAUGHS] But the thing that I think is actually very hard about the A.I. is, as you say, human beings, it is very hard to bullshit effectively because most people, it actually takes a certain amount of cognitive effort to be in that relationship with the truth and to completely detach from the truth.

And the A.I., there’s nothing like that at all. But we are not tuned for something where there’s nothing like that at all. We are used to people having to put some effort into their lies. It’s why very effective con artists are very effective because they’ve really trained how to do this.

I’m not exactly sure where this question goes. But this is a part of it that I feel like is going to be, in some ways, more socially disruptive. It is something that feels like us when we are talking to it but is very fundamentally unlike us at its core relationship to reality.

I think that’s basically correct. We have very substantial teams trying to focus on making sure that the models are factually accurate, that they tell the truth, that they ground their data in external information.

As you’ve indicated, doing searches isn’t itself reliable because search engines have this problem as well, right? Where is the source of truth?

So there’s a lot of challenges here. But I think at a high level, I agree this is really potentially an insidious problem, right? If we do this wrong, you could have systems that are the most convincing psychopaths or con artists.

One source of hope that I have, actually, is, you say these models don’t know whether they’re lying or they’re telling the truth. In terms of the inputs and outputs to the models, that’s absolutely true.

I mean, there’s a question of what does it even mean for a model to know something, but one of the things Anthropic has been working on since the very beginning of our company, we’ve had a team that focuses on trying to understand and look inside the models.

And one of the things we and others have found is that, sometimes, there are specific neurons, specific statistical indicators inside the model, not necessarily in its external responses, that can tell you when the model is lying or when it’s telling the truth.

And so at some level, sometimes, not in all circumstances, the models seem to know when they’re saying something false and when they’re saying something true. I wouldn’t say that the models are being intentionally deceptive, right? I wouldn’t ascribe agency or motivation to them, at least in this stage in where we are with A.I. systems. But there does seem to be something going on where the models do seem to need to have a picture of the world and make a distinction between things that are true and things that are not true.

If you think of how the models are trained, they read a bunch of stuff on the internet. A lot of it’s true. Some of it, more than we’d like, is false. And when you’re training the model, it has to model all of it. And so, I think it’s parsimonious, I think it’s useful to the models picture of the world for it to know when things are true and for it to know when things are false.

And then the hope is, can we amplify that signal? Can we either use our internal understanding of the model as an indicator for when the model is lying, or can we use that as a hook for further training? And there are at least hooks. There are at least beginnings of how to try to address this problem.

So I try as best I can, as somebody not well-versed in the technology here, to follow this work on what you’re describing, which I think, broadly speaking, is interpretability, right? Can we know what is happening inside the model? And over the past year, there have been some much hyped breakthroughs in interpretability.

And when I look at those breakthroughs, they are getting the vaguest possible idea of some relationships happening inside the statistical architecture of very toy models built at a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the complexity of Claude 1 or GPT-1, to say nothing of Claude 2, to say nothing of Claude 3, to say nothing of Claude Opus, to say nothing of Claude 4, which will come whenever Claude 4 comes.

We have this quality of like maybe we can imagine a pathway to interpreting a model that has a cognitive complexity of an inchworm. And meanwhile, we’re trying to create a superintelligence. How do you feel about that? How should I feel about that? How do you think about that?

I think, first, on interpretability, we are seeing substantial progress on being able to characterize, I would say, maybe the generation of models from six months ago. I think it’s not hopeless, and we do see a path. That said, I share your concern that the field is progressing very quickly relative to that.

And we’re trying to put as many resources into interpretability as possible. We’ve had one of our co-founders basically founded the field of interpretability. But also, we have to keep up with the market. So all of it’s very much a dilemma, right? Even if we stopped, then there’s all these other companies in the U.S. And even if some law stopped all the companies in the U.S., there’s a whole world of this.

Let me hold for a minute on the question of the competitive dynamics because before we leave this question of the machines that bullshit. It makes me think of this podcast we did a while ago with Demis Hassabis, who’s the head of Google DeepMind, which created AlphaFold.

And what was so interesting to me about AlphaFold is they built this system, that because it was limited to protein folding predictions, it was able to be much more grounded. And it was even able to create these uncertainty predictions, right? You know, it’s giving you a prediction, but it’s also telling you whether or not it is — how sure it is, how confident it is in that prediction.

That’s not true in the real world, right, for these super general systems trying to give you answers on all kinds of things. You can’t confine it that way. So when you talk about these future breakthroughs, when you talk about this system that would be much better at sorting truth from fiction, are you talking about a system that looks like the ones we have now, just much bigger, or are you talking about a system that is designed quite differently, the way AlphaFold was?

I am skeptical that we need to do something totally different. So I think today, many people have the intuition that the models are sort of eating up data that’s been gathered from the internet, code repos, whatever, and kind of spitting it out intelligently, but sort of spitting it out. And sometimes that leads to the view that the models can’t be better than the data they’re trained on or kind of can’t figure out anything that’s not in the data they’re trained on. You’re not going to get to Einstein level physics or Linus Pauling level chemistry or whatever.

I think we’re still on the part of the curve where it’s possible to believe that, although I think we’re seeing early indications that it’s false. And so, as a concrete example of this, the models that we’ve trained, like Claude 3 Opus, something like 99.9 percent accuracy, at least the base model, at adding 20-digit numbers. If you look at the training data on the internet, it is not that accurate at adding 20-digit numbers. You’ll find inaccurate arithmetic on the internet all the time, just as you’ll find inaccurate political views. You’ll find inaccurate technical views. You’re just going to find lots of inaccurate claims.

But the models, despite the fact that they’re wrong about a bunch of things, they can often perform better than the average of the data they see by — I don’t want to call it averaging out errors, but there’s some underlying truth, like in the case of arithmetic. There’s some underlying algorithm used to add the numbers.

And it’s simpler for the models to hit on that algorithm than it is for them to do this complicated thing of like, OK, I’ll get it right 90 percent of the time and wrong 10 percent of the time, right? This connects to things like Occam’s razor and simplicity and parsimony in science. There’s some relatively simple web of truth out there in the world, right?

We were talking about truth and falsehood and bullshit. One of the things about truth is that all the true things are connected in the world, whereas lies are kind of disconnected and don’t fit into the web of everything else that’s true.

So if you’re right and you’re going to have these models that develop this internal web of truth, I get how that model can do a lot of good. I also get how that model could do a lot of harm. And it’s not a model, not an A.I. system I’m optimistic that human beings are going to understand at a very deep level, particularly not when it is first developed. So how do you make rolling something like that out safe for humanity?

So late last year, we put out something called a responsible scaling plan. So the idea of that is to come up with these thresholds for an A.I. system being capable of certain things. We have what we call A.I. safety levels that in analogy to the biosafety levels, which are like, classify how dangerous a virus is and therefore what protocols you have to take to contain it, we’re currently at what we describe as A.S.L. 2.

A.S.L. 3 is tied to certain risks around the model of misuse of biology and ability to perform certain cyber tasks in a way that could be destructive. A.S.L. 4 is going to cover things like autonomy, things like probably persuasion, which we’ve talked about a lot before. And at each level, we specify a certain amount of safety research that we have to do, a certain amount of tests that we have to pass. And so, this allows us to have a framework for, well, when should we slow down? Should we slow down now? What about the rest of the market?

And I think the good thing is we came out with this in September, and then three months after we came out with ours, OpenAI came out with a similar thing. They gave it a different name, but it has a lot of properties in common. The head of DeepMind at Google said, we’re working on a similar framework. And I’ve heard informally that Microsoft might be working on a similar framework. Now, that’s not all the players in the ecosystem, but you’ve probably thought about the history of regulation and safety in other industries maybe more than I have.

This is the way you get to a workable regulatory regime. The companies start doing something, and when a majority of them are doing something, then government actors can have the confidence to say, well, this won’t kill the industry. Companies are already engaging in this. We don’t have to design this from scratch. In many ways, it’s already happening.

And we’re starting to see that. Bills have been proposed that look a little bit like our responsible scaling plan. That said, it kind of doesn’t fully solve the problem of like, let’s say we get to one of these thresholds and we need to understand what’s going on inside the model. And we don’t, and the prescription is, OK, we need to stop developing the models for some time.

If it’s like, we stop for a year in 2027, I think that’s probably feasible. If it’s like we need to stop for 10 years, that’s going to be really hard because the models are going to be built in other countries. People are going to break the laws. The economic pressure will be immense.

So I don’t feel perfectly satisfied with this approach because I think it buys us some time, but we’re going to need to pair it with an incredibly strong effort to understand what’s going on inside the models.

To the people who say, getting on this road where we are barreling towards very powerful systems is dangerous — we shouldn’t do it at all, or we shouldn’t do it this fast — you have said, listen, if we are going to learn how to make these models safe, we have to make the models, right? The construction of the model was meant to be in service, largely, to making the model safe.

Then everybody starts making models. These very same companies start making fundamental important breakthroughs, and then they end up in a race with each other. And obviously, countries end up in a race with other countries. And so, the dynamic that has taken hold is there’s always a reason that you can justify why you have to keep going. And that’s true, I think, also at the regulatory level, right? I mean, I do think regulators have been thoughtful about this. I think there’s been a lot of interest from members of Congress. I talked to them about this. But they’re also very concerned about the international competition. And if they weren’t, the national security people come and talk to them and say, well, we definitely cannot fall behind here.

And so, if you don’t believe these models will ever become so powerful, they become dangerous, fine. But because you do believe that, how do you imagine this actually playing out?

Yeah, so basically, all of the things you’ve said are true at once, right? There doesn’t need to be some easy story for why we should do X or why we should do Y, right? It can be true at the same time that to do effective safety research, you need to make the larger models, and that if we don’t make models, someone less safe will. And at the same time, we can be caught in this bad dynamic at the national and international level. So I think of those as not contradictory, but just creating a difficult landscape that we have to navigate.

Look, I don’t have the answer. Like, I’m one of a significant number of players trying to navigate this. Many are well-intentioned, some are not. I have a limited ability to affect it. And as often happens in history, things are often driven by these kind of impersonal pressures. But one thought I have and really want to push on with respect to the R.S.P.s —

Can you say what the R.S.P.s are?

Responsible Scaling Plan, the thing I was talking about before. The levels of A.I. safety, and in particular, tying decisions to pause scaling to the measurement of specific dangers or the absence of the ability to show safety or the presence of certain capabilities. One way I think about it is, at the end of the day, this is ultimately an exercise in getting a coalition on board with doing something that goes against economic pressures.

And so, if you say now, ‘Well, I don’t know. These things, they might be dangerous in the future. We’re on this exponential.’ It’s just hard. Like, it’s hard to get a multi-trillion dollar company. It’s certainly hard to get a military general to say, all right, well, we just won’t do this. It’ll confer some huge advantage to others. But we just won’t do this.

I think the thing that could be more convincing is tying the decision to hold back in a very scoped way that’s done across the industry to particular dangers. My testimony in front of Congress, I warned about the potential misuse of models for biology. That isn’t the case today, right? You can get a small uplift to the models relative to doing a Google search, and many people dismiss the risk. And I don’t know — maybe they’re right. The exponential scaling laws suggest to me that they’re not right, but we don’t have any direct hard evidence.

But let’s say we get to 2025, and we demonstrate something truly scary. Most people do not want technology out in the world that can create bioweapons. And so I think, at moments like that, there could be a critical coalition tied to risks that we can really make concrete. Yes, it will always be argued that adversaries will have these capabilities as well. But at least the trade-off will be clear, and there’s some chance for sensible policy.

I mean to be clear, I’m someone who thinks the benefits of this technology are going to outweigh its costs. And I think the whole idea behind RSP is to prepare to make that case, if the dangers are real. If they’re not real, then we can just proceed and make things that are great and wonderful for the world. And so, it has the flexibility to work both ways.

Again, I don’t think it’s perfect. I’m someone who thinks whatever we do, even with all the regulatory framework, I doubt we can slow down that much. But when I think about what’s the best way to steer a sensible course here, that’s the closest I can think of right now. Probably there’s a better plan out there somewhere, but that’s the best thing I’ve thought of so far.

One of the things that has been on my mind around regulation is whether or not the founding insight of Anthropic of OpenAI is even more relevant to the government, that if you are the body that is supposed to, in the end, regulate and manage the safety of societal-level technologies like artificial intelligence, do you not need to be building your own foundation models and having huge collections of research scientists and people of that nature working on them, testing them, prodding them, remaking them, in order to understand the damn thing well enough — to the extent any of us or anyone understands the damn thing well enough — to regulate it?

I say that recognizing that it would be very, very hard for the government to get good enough that it can build these foundation models to hire those people, but it’s not impossible. I think right now, it wants to take the approach to regulating A.I. that it somewhat wishes it took to regulating social media, which is to think about the harms and pass laws about those harms earlier.

But does it need to be building the models itself, developing that kind of internal expertise, so it can actually be a participant in different ways, both for regulatory reasons and maybe for other reasons, for public interest reasons? Maybe it wants to do things with a model that they’re just not possible if they’re dependent on access to the OpenAI, the Anthropic, the Google products.

I think government directly building the models, I think that will happen in some places. It’s kind of challenging, right? Like, government has a huge amount of money, but let’s say you wanted to provision $100 billion to train a giant foundation model. The government builds it. It has to hire people under government hiring rules. There’s a lot of practical difficulties that would come with it.

Doesn’t mean it won’t happen or it shouldn’t happen. But something that I’m more confident of that I definitely think is that government should be more involved in the use and the finetuning of these models, and that deploying them within government will help governments, especially the U.S. government, but also others, to get an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, the benefits and the dangers. So I’m super supportive of that.

I think there’s maybe a second thing you’re getting at, which I’ve thought about a lot as a C.E.O. of one of these companies, which is, if these predictions on the exponential trend are right, and we should be humble — and I don’t know if they’re right or not. My only evidence is that they appear to have been correct for the last few years. And so, I’m just expecting by induction that they continue to be correct. I don’t know that they will, but let’s say they are. The power of these models is going to be really quite incredible.

And as a private actor in charge of one of the companies developing these models, I’m kind of uncomfortable with the amount of power that that entails. I think that it potentially exceeds the power of, say, the social media companies maybe by a lot.

You know, occasionally, in the more science fictiony world of A.I. and the people who think about A.I. risk, someone will ask me like, OK, let’s say you build the A.G.I. What are you going to do with it? Will you cure the diseases? Will you create this kind of society?

And I’m like, who do you think you’re talking to? Like a king? I just find that to be a really, really disturbing way of conceptualizing running an A.I. company. And I hope there are no companies whose C.E.O.s actually think about things that way.

I mean, the whole technology, not just the regulation, but the oversight of the technology, like the wielding of it, it feels a little bit wrong for it to ultimately be in the hands — maybe I think it’s fine at this stage, but to ultimately be in the hands of private actors. There’s something undemocratic about that much power concentration.

I have now, I think, heard some version of this from the head of most of, maybe all of, the A.I. companies, in one way or another. And it has a quality to me of, Lord, grant me chastity but not yet.

Which is to say that I don’t know what it means to say that we’re going to invent something so powerful that we don’t trust ourselves to wield it. I mean, Amazon just gave you guys $2.75 billion. They don’t want to see that investment nationalized.

No matter how good-hearted you think OpenAI is, Microsoft doesn’t want GPT-7, all of a sudden, the government is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re taking this over for the public interest, or the U.N. is going to handle it in some weird world or whatever it might be. I mean, Google doesn’t want that.

And this is a thing that makes me a little skeptical of the responsible scaling laws or the other iterative versions of that I’ve seen in other companies or seen or heard talked about by them, which is that it’s imagining this moment that is going to come later, when the money around these models is even bigger than it is now, the power, the possibility, the economic uses, the social dependence, the celebrity of the founders. It’s all worked out. We’ve maintained our pace on the exponential curve. We’re 10 years in the future.

And at some point, everybody is going to look up and say, this is actually too much. It is too much power. And this has to somehow be managed in some other way. And even if the C.E.O.s of the things were willing to do that, which is a very open question by the time you get there, even if they were willing to do that, the investors, the structures, the pressure around them, in a way, I think we saw a version of this — and I don’t know how much you’re going to be willing to comment on it — with the sort of OpenAI board, Sam Altman thing, where I’m very convinced that wasn’t about A.I. safety. I’ve talked to figures on both sides of that. They all sort of agree it wasn’t about A.I. safety.

But there was this moment of, if you want to press the off switch, can you, if you’re the weird board created to press the off switch. And the answer was no, you can’t, right? They’ll just reconstitute it over at Microsoft.

There’s functionally no analogy I know of in public policy where the private sector built something so powerful that when it reached maximum power, it was just handed over in some way to the public interest.

Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right to be skeptical, and similarly, what I said with the previous questions of there are just these dilemmas left and right that have no easy answer. But I think I can give a little more concreteness than what you’ve pointed at, and maybe more concreteness than others have said, although I don’t know what others have said. We’re at A.S.L. 2 in our responsible scaling plan. These kinds of issues, I think they’re going to become a serious matter when we reach, say, A.S.L. 4. So that’s not a date and time. We haven’t even fully specified A.S.L. 4 —

Just because this is a lot of jargon, just, what do you specify A.S.L. 3 as? And then as you say, A.S.L. 4 is actually left quite undefined. So what are you implying A.S.L. 4 is?

A.S.L. 3 is triggered by risks related to misuse of biology and cyber technology. A.S.L. 4, we’re working on now.

Be specific. What do you mean? Like, what is the thing a system could do or would do that would trigger it?

Yes, so for example, on biology, the way we’ve defined it — and we’re still refining the test, but the way we’ve defined it is, relative to use of a Google search, there’s a substantial increase in risk as would be evaluated by, say, the national security community of misuse of biology, creation of bioweapons, that either the proliferation or spread of it is greater than it was before, or the capabilities are substantially greater than it was before.

We’ll probably have some more exact quantitative thing, working with folks who are ex-government biodefense folks, but something like this accounts for 20 percent of the total source of risk of biological attacks, or something increases the risk by 20 percent or something like that. So that would be a very concrete version of it. It’s just, it takes us time to develop very concrete criteria. So that would be like A.S.L. 3.

A.S.L. 4 is going to be more about, on the misuse side, enabling state-level actors to greatly increase their capability, which is much harder than enabling random people. So where we would worry that North Korea or China or Russia could greatly enhance their offensive capabilities in various military areas with A.I. in a way that would give them a substantial advantage at the geopolitical level. And on the autonomy side, it’s various measures of these models are pretty close to being able to replicate and survive in the wild.

So it feels maybe one step short of models that would, I think, raise truly existential questions. And so, I think what I’m saying is when we get to that latter stage, that A.S.L. 4, that is when I think it may make sense to think about what is the role of government in stewarding this technology.

Again, I don’t really know what it looks like. You’re right. All of these companies have investors. They have folks involved.

You talk about just handing the models over. I suspect there’s some way to hand over the most dangerous or societally sensitive components or capabilities of the models without fully turning off the commercial tap. I don’t know that there’s a solution that every single actor is happy with. But again, I get to this idea of demonstrating specific risk.

If you look at times in history, like World War I or World War II, industries’ will can be bent towards the state. They can be gotten to do things that aren’t necessarily profitable in the short-term because they understand that there’s an emergency. Right now, we don’t have an emergency. We just have a line on a graph that weirdos like me believe in and a few people like you who are interviewing me may somewhat believe in. We don’t have clear and present danger.

When you imagine how many years away, just roughly, A.S.L. 3 is and how many years away A.S.L. 4 is, right, you’ve thought a lot about this exponential scaling curve. If you just had to guess, what are we talking about?

Yeah, I think A.S.L. 3 could easily happen this year or next year. I think A.S.L. 4 —

Oh, Jesus Christ.

No, no, I told you. I’m a believer in exponentials. I think A.S.L. 4 could happen anywhere from 2025 to 2028.

So that is fast.

Yeah, no, no, I’m truly talking about the near future here. I’m not talking about 50 years away. God grant me chastity, but not now. But “not now” doesn’t mean when I’m old and gray. I think it could be near term. I don’t know. I could be wrong. But I think it could be a near term thing.

But so then, if you think about this, I feel like what you’re describing, to go back to something we talked about earlier, that there’s been this step function for societal impact of A.I., the curve of the capabilities exponential, but every once in a while, something happens, ChatGPT, for instance, Midjourney with photos. And all of a sudden, a lot of people feel it. They realize what has happened and they react. They use it. They deploy it in their companies. They invest in it, whatever.

And it sounds to me like that is the structure of the political economy you’re describing here. Either something happens where the bioweapon capability is demonstrated or the offensive cyber weapon capability is demonstrated, and that freaks out the government, or possibly something happens, right? Describing World War I and World War II is your examples did not actually fill me with comfort because in order to bend industry to government’s will, in those cases, we had to have an actual world war. It doesn’t do it that easily.

You could use coronavirus, I think, as another example where there was a significant enough global catastrophe that companies and governments and even people did things you never would have expected. But the examples we have of that happening are something terrible. All those examples end up with millions of bodies. I’m not saying that’s going to be true for A.I., but it does sound like that is a political economy. No, you can’t imagine it now, in the same way that you couldn’t have imagined the sort of pre and post-ChatGPT world exactly, but that something happens and the world changes. Like, it’s a step function everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, I think my positive version of this, not to be so — to get a little bit away from the doom and gloom, is that the dangers are demonstrated in a concrete way that is really convincing, but without something actually bad happening, right? I think the worst way to learn would be for something actually bad to happen. And I’m hoping every day that doesn’t happen, and we learn bloodlessly.

We’ve been talking here about conceptual limits and curves, but I do want, before we end, to reground us a little bit in the physical reality, right? I think that if you’re using A.I., it can feel like this digital bits and bytes, sitting in the cloud somewhere.

But what it is in a physical way is huge numbers of chips, data centers, an enormous amount of energy, all of which does rely on complicated supply chains. And what happens if something happens between China and Taiwan, and the makers of a lot of these chips become offline or get captured? How do you think about the necessity of compute power? And when you imagine the next five years, what does that supply chain look like? How does it have to change from where it is now? And what vulnerabilities exist in it?

Yeah, so one, I think this may end up being the greatest geopolitical issue of our time. And man, this relates to things that are way above my pay grade, which are military decisions about whether and how to defend Taiwan. All I can do is say what I think the implications for A.I. is. I think those implications are pretty stark. I think there’s a big question of like, OK, we built these powerful models.

One, is there enough supply to build them? Two is control over that supply, a way to think about safety issues or a way to think about balance of geopolitical power. And three, if those chips are used to build data centers, where are those data centers going to be? Are they going to be in the U.S.? Are they going to be in a U.S. ally? Are they going to be in the Middle East? Are they going to be in China?

All of those have enormous implications, and then the supply chain itself can be disrupted. And political and military decisions can be made on the basis of where things are. So it sounds like an incredibly sticky problem to me. I don’t know that I have any great insight on this. I mean, as a U.S. citizen and someone who believes in democracy, I am someone who hopes that we can find a way to build data centers and to have the largest quantity of chips available in the U.S. and allied democratic countries.

Well, there is some insight you should have into it, which is that you’re a customer here, right? And so, five years ago, the people making these chips did not realize what the level of demand for them was going to be. I mean, what has happened to Nvidia’s stock prices is really remarkable.

But also what is implied about the future of Nvidia’s stock prices is really remarkable. Rana Foroohar, the Financial Times, cited this market analysis. It would take 4,500 years for Nvidia’s future dividends to equal its current price, 4,500 years. So that is a view about how much Nvidia is going to be making in the next couple of years. It is really quite astounding.

I mean, you’re, in theory, already working on or thinking about how to work on the next generation of Claude. You’re going to need a lot of chips for that. You’re working with Amazon. Are you having trouble getting the amount of compute that you feel you need? I mean, are you already bumping up against supply constraints? Or has the supply been able to change, to adapt to you?

We’ve been able to get the compute that we need for this year, I suspect also for next year as well. I think once things get to 2026, 2027, 2028, then the amount of compute gets to levels that starts to strain the capabilities of the semiconductor industry. The semiconductor industry still mostly produces C.P.U.s, right? Just the things in your laptop, not the things in the data centers that train the A.I. models. But as the economic value of the GPUs goes up and up and up because of the value of the A.I. models, that’s going to switch over. But you know what? At some point, you hit the limits of that or you hit the limits of how fast you can switch over. And so, again, I expect there to be a big supply crunch around data centers, around chips, and around energy and power for both regulatory and physics reasons, sometime in the next few years. And that’s a risk, but it’s also an opportunity. I think it’s an opportunity to think about how the technology can be governed.

And it’s also an opportunity, I’ll repeat again, to think about how democracies can lead. I think it would be very dangerous if the leaders in this technology and the holders of the main resources were authoritarian countries. The combination of A.I. and authoritarianism, both internally and on the international stage, is very frightening to me.

How about the question of energy? I mean, this requires just a tremendous amount of energy. And I mean, I’ve seen different numbers like this floating around. It very much could be in the coming years like adding a Bangladesh to the world’s energy usage. Or pick your country, right? I don’t know what exactly you all are going to be using by 2028.

Microsoft, on its own, is opening a new data center globally every three days. You have — and this is coming from a Financial Times article — federal projections for 20 new gas-fired power plants in the U.S. by 2024 to 2025. There’s a lot of talk about this being now a new golden era for natural gas because we have a bunch of it. There is this huge need for new power to manage all this data, to manage all this compute.

So, one, I feel like there’s a literal question of how do you get the energy you need and at what price, but also a more kind of moral, conceptual question of, we have real problems with global warming. We have real problems with how much energy we’re using. And here, we’re taking off on this really steep curve of how much of it we seem to be needing to devote to the new A.I. race.

It really comes down to, what are the uses that the model is being put to, right? So I think the worrying case would be something like crypto, right? I’m someone who’s not a believer that whatever the energy was that was used to mine the next Bitcoin, I think that was purely additive. I think that wasn’t there before. And I’m unable to think of any useful thing that’s created by that.

But I don’t think that’s the case with A.I. Maybe A.I. makes solar energy more efficient or maybe it solves controlled nuclear fusion, or maybe it makes geoengineering more stable or possible. But I don’t think we need to rely on the long run. There are some applications where the model is doing something that used to be automated, that used to be done by computer systems. And the model is able to do it faster with less computing time, right? Those are pure wins. And there are some of those.

There are others where it’s using the same amount of computing resources or maybe more computing resources, but to do something more valuable that saves labor elsewhere. Then there are cases where something used to be done by humans or in the physical world, and now it’s being done by the models. Maybe it does something that previously I needed to go into the office to do that thing. And now I no longer need to go into the office to do that thing.

So I don’t have to get in my car. I don’t have to use the gas that was used for that. The energy accounting for that is kind of hard. You compare it to the food that the humans eat and what the energy cost of producing that.

So in all honesty, I don’t think we have good answers about what fraction of the usage points one way and one fraction of the usage points to others. In many ways, how different is this from the general dilemma of, as the economy grows, it uses more energy?

So I guess, what I’m saying is, it kind of all matters how you use the technology. I mean, my kind of boring short-term answer is, we get carbon offsets for all of this stuff. But let’s look beyond that to the macro question here.

But to take the other side of it, I mean, I think the difference, when you say this is always a question we have when we’re growing G.D.P., is it’s not quite. It’s cliché because it’s true to say that the major global warming challenge right now is countries like China and India getting richer. And we want them to get richer. It is a huge human imperative, right, a moral imperative for poor people in the world to become less poor. And if that means they use more energy, then we just need to figure out how to make that work. And we don’t know of a way for that to happen without them using more energy.

Adding A.I. is not that it raises a whole different set of questions, but we’re already straining at the boundaries, or maybe far beyond them, of safely what we can do energetically. Now we add in this, and so maybe some of the energy efficiency gains you’re going to get in rich countries get wiped out. For this sort of uncertain payoff in the future of maybe through A.I., we figure out ways to stabilize nuclear fusion or something, right, you could imagine ways that could help, but those ways are theoretical.

And in the near term, the harm in terms of energy usage is real. And also, by the way, the harm in terms of just energy prices. It’s also just tricky because all these companies, Microsoft, Amazon, I mean, they all have a lot of renewable energy targets. Now if that is colliding with their market incentives, it feels like they’re running really fast towards the market incentives without an answer for how all that nets out.

Yeah, I mean, I think the concerns are real. Let me push back a little bit, which is, again, I don’t think the benefits are purely in the future. It kind of goes back to what I said before. Like, there may be use cases now that are net energy saving, or that to the extent that they’re not net energy saving, do so through the general mechanism of, oh, there was more demand for this thing.

I don’t think anyone has done a good enough job measuring, in part because the applications of A.I. are so new, which of those things dominate or what’s going to happen to the economy. But I don’t think we should assume that the harms are entirely in the present and the benefits are entirely in the future. I think that’s my only point here.

I guess you could imagine a world where we were, somehow or another, incentivizing uses of A.I. that were yoked to some kind of social purpose. We were putting a lot more into drug discovery, or we cared a lot about things that made remote work easier, or pick your set of public goods.

But what actually seems to me to be happening is we’re building more and more and more powerful models and just throwing them out there within a terms of service structure to say, use them as long as you’re not trying to politically manipulate people or create a bioweapon. Just try to figure this out, right? Try to create new stories and ask it about your personal life, and make a video game with it. And Sora comes out sooner or later. Make new videos with it. And all that is going to be very energy intensive.

I am not saying that I have a plan for yoking A.I. to social good, and in some ways, you can imagine that going very, very wrong. But it does mean that for a long time, it’s like you could imagine the world you’re talking about, but that would require some kind of planning that nobody is engaged in, and I don’t think anybody even wants to be engaged in.

Not everyone has the same conception of social good. One person may think social good is this ideology. Another person — we’ve seen that with some of the Gemini stuff.

But companies can try to make beneficial applications themselves, right? Like, this is why we’re working with cancer institutes. We’re hoping to partner with ministries of education in Africa, to see if we can use the models in kind of a positive way for education, rather than the way they may be used by default. So I think individual companies, individual people, can take actions to steer or bend this towards the public good.

That said, it’s never going to be the case that 100 percent of what we do is that. And so I think it’s a good question. What are the societal incentives, without dictating ideology or defining the public good from on high, what are incentives that could help with this?

I don’t feel like I have a systemic answer either. I can only think in terms of what Anthropic tries to do.

But there’s also the question of training data and the intellectual property that is going into things like Claude, like GPT, like Gemini. There are a number of copyright lawsuits. You’re facing some. OpenAI is facing some. I suspect everybody is either facing them now or will face them.

And a broad feeling that these systems are being trained on the combined intellectual output of a lot of different people — the way that Claude can quite effectively mimic the way I write is it has been trained, to some degree, on my writing, right? So it actually does get my stylistic tics quite well. You seem great, but you haven’t sent me a check on that. And this seems like somewhere where there is real liability risk for the industry. Like, what if you do actually have to compensate the people who this is being trained on? And should you?

And I recognize you probably can’t comment on lawsuits themselves, but I’m sure you’ve had to think a lot about this. And so, I’m curious both how you understand it as a risk, but also how you understand it morally. I mean, when you talk about the people who invent these systems gaining a lot of power, and alongside that, a lot of wealth, well, what about all the people whose work went into them such that they can create images in a million different styles? And I mean, somebody came up with those styles. What is the responsibility back to the intellectual commons? And not just to the commons, but to the actual wages and economic prospects of the people who made all this possible?

I think everyone agrees the models shouldn’t be verbatim outputting copyrighted content. For things that are available on the web, for publicly available, our position — and I think there’s a strong case for it — is that the training process, again, we don’t think it’s just hoovering up content and spitting it out, or it shouldn’t be spitting it out. It’s really much more like the process of how a human learns from experiences. And so, our position that that is sufficiently transformative, and I think the law will back this up, that this is fair use.

But those are narrow legal ways to think about the problem. I think we have a broader issue, which is that regardless of how it was trained, it would still be the case that we’re building more and more general cognitive systems, and that those systems will create disruption. Maybe not necessarily by one for one replacing humans, but they’re really going to change how the economy works and which skills are valued. And we need a solution to that broad macroeconomic problem, right?

As much as I’ve asserted the narrow legal points that I asserted before, we have a broader problem here, and we shouldn’t be blind to that. There’s a number of solutions. I mean, I think the simplest one, which I recognize doesn’t address some of the deeper issues here, is things around the kind of guaranteed basic income side of things.

But I think there’s a deeper question here, which is like as A.I. systems become capable of larger and larger slices of cognitive labor, how does society organize itself economically? How do people find work and meaning and all of that?

And just as kind of we transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society and the meaning of work changed, and it was no longer true that 99 percent of people were peasants working on farms and had to find new methods of economic organization, I suspect there’s some different method of economic organization that’s going to be forced as the only possible response to disruptions to the economy that will be small at first, but will grow over time, and that we haven’t worked out what that is.

We need to find something that allows people to find meaning that’s humane and that maximizes our creativity and potential and flourishing from A.I.

And as with many of these questions, I don’t have the answer to that. Right? I don’t have a prescription. But that’s what we somehow need to do.

But I want to sit in between the narrow legal response and the broad “we have to completely reorganize society” response, although I think that response is actually possible over the decades. And in the middle of that is a more specific question. I mean, you could even take it from the instrumental side. There is a lot of effort now to build search products that use these systems, right? ChatGPT will use Bing to search for you.

And that means that the person is not going to Bing and clicking on the website where ChatGPT is getting its information and giving that website an advertising impression that they can turn into a very small amount of money, or they’re not going to that website and having a really good experience with that website and becoming maybe likelier to subscribe to whoever is behind that website.

And so, on the one hand, that seems like some kind of injustice done to the people creating the information that these systems are using. I mean, this is true for perplexity. It’s true for a lot of things I’m beginning to see around where the A.I.s are either trained on or are using a lot of data that people have generated at some real cost. But not only are they not paying people for that, but they’re actually stepping into the middle of where they would normally be a direct relationship and making it so that relationship never happens.

That also, I think, in the long run, creates a training data problem, even if you just want to look at it instrumentally, where if it becomes nonviable to do journalism or to do a lot of things to create high quality information out there, the A.I.‘s ability, right, the ability of all of your companies to get high quality, up-to-date, constantly updated information becomes a lot trickier. So there both seems to me to be both a moral and a self-interested dimension to this.

Yeah, so I think there may be business models that work for everyone, not because it’s illegitimate to train on open data from the web in a legal sense, but just because there may be business models here that kind of deliver a better product. So things I’m thinking of are like newspapers have archives. Some of them aren’t publicly available. But even if they are, it may be a better product, maybe a better experience, to, say, talk to this newspaper or talk to that newspaper.

It may be a better experience to give the ability to interact with content and point to places in the content, and every time you call that content, to have some kind of business relationship with the creators of that content. So there may be business models here that propagate the value in the right way, right? You talk about LLMs using search products. I mean, sure, you’re going around the ads, but there’s no reason it can’t work in a different way, right?

There’s no reason that the users can’t pay the search A.P.I.s, instead of it being paid through advertising, and then have that propagate through to wherever the original mechanism is that paid the creators of the content. So when value is being created, money can flow through.

Let me try to end by asking a bit about how to live on the slope of the curve you believe we are on. Do you have kids?

I’m married. I do not have kids.

So I have two kids. I have a two-year-old and a five-year-old. And particularly when I’m doing A.I. reporting, I really do sit in bed at night and think, what should I be doing here with them? What world am I trying to prepare them for? And what is needed in that world that is different from what is needed in this world, even if I believe there’s some chance — and I do believe there’s some chance — that all the things you’re saying are true. That implies a very, very, very different life for them.

I know people in your company with kids. I know they are thinking about this. How do you think about that? I mean, what do you think should be different in the life of a two-year-old who is living through the pace of change that you are telling me is true here? If you had a kid, how would this change the way you thought about it?

The very short answer is, I don’t know, and I have no idea, but we have to try anyway, right? People have to raise kids, and they have to do it as best they can. An obvious recommendation is just familiarity with the technology and how it works, right? The basic paradigm of, I’m talking to systems, and systems are taking action on my behalf, obviously, as much familiarity with that as possible is, I think, helpful.

In terms of what should children learn in school, what are the careers of tomorrow, I just truly don’t know, right? You could take this to say, well, it’s important to learn STEM and programming and A.I. and all of that. But A.I. will impact that as well, right? I don’t think any of it is going to —

Possibly first.

Yeah, right, possibly first.

It seems better at coding than it is at other things.

I don’t think it’s going to work out for any of these systems to just do one for one what humans are going to do. I don’t really think that way. But I think it may fundamentally change industries and professions one by one in ways that are hard to predict. And so, I feel like I only have clichés here. Like get familiar with the technology. Teach your children to be adaptable, to be ready for a world that changes very quickly. I wish I had better answers, but I think that’s the best I got.

I agree that’s not a good answer. [LAUGHS] Let me ask that same question a bit from another direction, because one thing you just said is get familiar with the technology. And the more time I spend with the technology, the more I fear that happening. What I see when people use A.I. around me is that the obvious thing that technology does for you is automate the early parts of the creative process. The part where you’re supposed to be reading something difficult yourself? Well, the A.I. can summarize it for you. The part where you’re supposed to sit there with a blank page and write something? Well, the A.I. can give you a first draft. And later on, you have to check it and make sure it actually did what you wanted it to do and fact-checking it. And but I believe a lot of what makes humans good at thinking comes in those parts.

And I am older and have self-discipline, and maybe this is just me hanging on to an old way of doing this, right? You could say, why use a calculator from this perspective. But my actual worry is that I’m not sure if the thing they should do is use A.I. a lot or use it a little. This, to me, is actually a really big branching path, right? Do I want my kids learning how to use A.I. or being in a context where they’re using it a lot, or actually, do I want to protect them from it as much as I possibly could so they develop more of the capacity to read a book quietly on their own or write a first draft? I actually don’t know. I’m curious if you have a view on it.

I think this is part of what makes the interaction between A.I. and society complicated where it’s sometimes hard to distinguish when is an A.I. doing something, saving you labor or drudge work, versus kind of doing the interesting part. I will say that over and over again, you’ll get some technological thing, some technological system that does what you thought was the core of what you’re doing, and yet, what you’re doing turns out to have more pieces than you think it does and kind of add up to more things, right?

It’s like before, I used to have to ask for directions. I got Google Maps to do that. And you could worry, am I too reliant on Google Maps? Do I forget the environment around me? Well, it turns out, in some ways, I still need to have a sense of the city and the environment around me. It just kind of reallocates the space in my brain to some other aspect of the task.

And I just kind of suspect — I don’t know. Internally, within Anthropic, one of the things I do that helps me run the company is, I’ll write these documents on strategy or just some thinking in some direction that others haven’t thought. And of course, I sometimes use the internal models for that. And I think what I found is like, yes, sometimes they’re a little bit good at conceptualizing the idea, but the actual genesis of the idea, I’ve just kind of found a workflow where I don’t use them for that. They’re not that helpful for that. But they’re helpful in figuring out how to phrase a certain thing or how to refine my ideas.

So maybe I’m just saying — I don’t know. You just find a workflow where the thing complements you. And if it doesn’t happen naturally, it somehow still happens eventually. Again, if the systems get general enough, if they get powerful enough, we may need to think along other lines. But in the short-term, I, at least, have always found that. Maybe that’s too sanguine. Maybe that’s too optimistic.

I think, then, that’s a good place to end this conversation. Though, obviously, the exponential curve continues. So always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

So, yeah, I’ve prepared three. They’re all topical, though, in some cases, indirectly so. The first one will be obvious. It’s a very long book. The physical book is very thick, but “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” Richard Rhodes. It’s an example of technology being developed very quickly and with very broad implications. Just looking through all the characters and how they reacted to this and how people who were basically scientists gradually realized the incredible implications of the technology and how it would lead them into a world that was very different from the one they were used to.

My second recommendation is a science fiction series, “The Expanse” series of books. So I initially watched the show, and then I read all the books. And the world it creates is very advanced. In some cases, it has longer life spans, and humans have expanded into space. But we still face some of the same geopolitical questions and some of the same inequalities and exploitations that exist in our world, are still present, in some cases, worse.

That’s all the backdrop of it.

And the core of it is about some fundamentally new technological object that is being brought into that world and how everyone reacts to it, how governments react to it, how individual people react to it, and how political ideologies react to it. And so, I don’t know. When I read that a few years ago, I saw a lot of parallels.

And then my third recommendation would be actually “The Guns of August,” which is basically a history of how World War I started. The basic idea that crises happen very fast, almost no one knows what’s going on. There are lots of miscalculations because there are humans at the center of it, and kind of, we somehow have to learn to step back and make wiser decisions in these key moments. It’s said that Kennedy read the book before the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so I hope our current policymakers are at least thinking along the same terms because I think it is possible similar crises may be coming our way.

Dario Amodei, thank you very much.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

• April 16, 2024   •   49:17 A $1.7 Million Toilet and Liberalism’s Failure to Build
• April 12, 2024   •   1:33:07 What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.?
• April 5, 2024   •   1:25:33 Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?
• April 2, 2024   •   1:14:31 How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?
• March 29, 2024   •   1:18:30 The Rise of ‘Middle-Finger Politics’
• March 22, 2024   •   1:08:32 The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals
• March 19, 2024   •   1:03:11 Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?
• March 12, 2024   •   1:03:52 What a Second Biden Term Would Look Like
• March 8, 2024   •   1:00:40 How America’s Two Abortion Realities Are Clashing
• March 5, 2024   •   1:02:18 Marilynne Robinson on Biblical Beauty, Human Evil and the Idea of Israel
• March 1, 2024   •   1:05:52 The Wars in Ukraine and Gaza Have Changed. America’s Policy Hasn’t.
• February 23, 2024   •   51:24 Your Questions on Open Conventions, a Gaza Schism and Biden’s Chances

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

Back in 2018, Dario Amodei worked at OpenAI. And looking at one of its first A.I. models, he wondered: What would happen as you fed an artificial intelligence more and more data?

He and his colleagues decided to study it, and they found that the A.I. didn’t just get better with more data; it got better exponentially. The curve of the A.I.’s capabilities rose slowly at first and then shot up like a hockey stick.

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Amodei is now the chief executive of his own A.I. company, Anthropic, which recently released Claude 3 — considered by many to be the strongest A.I. model available. And he still believes A.I. is on an exponential growth curve, following principles known as scaling laws. And he thinks we’re on the steep part of the climb right now.

When I’ve talked to people who are building A.I., scenarios that feel like far-off science fiction end up on the horizon of about the next two years. So I asked Amodei on the show to share what he sees in the near future. What breakthroughs are around the corner? What worries him the most? And how are societies that struggle to adapt to change and governments that are slow to react to them supposed to prepare for the pace of change he predicts? What does that line on his graph mean for the rest of us?

This episode contains strong language.

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio App , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

(A full transcript of this episode is available here .)

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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