First we introduce you to the course, then we explain how we review student work using rubrics. Finally, we ask you to send us a a writing sample. The writing sample or pre-assessment serves to let your instructor get familiar with your writing style and current skills before you begin the course. Videos with tips to approach each step in the writing process are on the lesson pages, and links to audios of all the lessons and resource articles are available too. Not only that, but whenever you click over to a resource article, you'll find pdfs available for you to download. Finally, this lesson includes a link to download and keep the rubric as well as samples of persuasive essays completed at both the proficiency and mastery levels. By the end of this lesson, you will have a very clear idea of what we seek from you, and we'll know where your writing skills are before you begin.

In our Purpose and Description, we explain why it's important to be able to recognize a persuasive essay prompt and we show you where many students fail to construct this very specific type of essay correctly. In step one of our five step writing process, brainstorming, we give you the opportunity to choose your own topic, but then we provide a worksheet to help you brainstorm argument ideas that serves to form a strong and thoroughly persuasive essay.

This lesson is an easy one for you! Here's the secret -- the worksheet you did in Lesson 2 follows the development structure a persuasive essay should take, so your ideas are already organized. All you have to do is put them in an outline.

Now at the third of our five step writing process, we begin our first draft. We call this step free writing because we want you to follow the order of ideas in your outline and write freely and completely about each of them. No attention to grammar, spelling or mechanics is given in this first draft. The focus in this step is to express and explain your main ideas and their supporting details in your own unique way from your unique perspective. It's your voice we want to hear. Focus on your ideas and crafting strong arguments in support of your chosen position on your chosen topic.

In revision, step four of our five step writing process, we make structural revisions to your essay. We make sure each paragraph has a clear topic sentence and that the supporting details transition smoothly from one to the other. There also must be a smooth flow from paragraph to paragraph. Then you're instructed on how to create a thesis statement, introduction and conclusion for your essay. Here you'll start to see links to even more of our resource articles as we make sure your essay has a strong, solid structure. When doing revisions for the persuasive essay, we give special focus on crafting a conclusion that strongly reinforces your position taken on your topic.

Now we're on the fifth and final step of our writing process, editing. This lesson is quite long, as we go into descriptions of all the detail work you'll have to do to finish your essay. Transitions, sentence structure, mechanics, vocabulary, subject verb agreement, word choice and more are covered in this lesson. Your instructor won't correct your paper for you in this last step, but she or he will guide you to make those corrections yourself. This way, we train you to become independent with this final, yet extremely important, step when you face writing projects on your own in the future.

In this final lesson, we review what students have learned, provide a certificate of completion to add to their high school transcript records, and ask for a course evaluation.