Tools to Teach Essay Writing: An Argument Essay Outline

If you asked us to choose the most important thing to cover in an ELA class, we’d probably choose argumentative writing.

This is not to say that we love to teach essay writing. We can easily rattle off a number of units that are more fun to teach—theme, irony, the hero’s journey, our beloved Pride and Prejudice. But when we think through the long list of standards we’re meant to cover, argumentative writing stands out as the one our students most need to master for success in college and beyond.

No matter what discipline our students choose to study in the future, they’ll need to be able to craft a strong argument, and if you’ve ever attempted to teach essay writing, you know just how much help and practice students need to master this skill.

But you also know that it’s hard to teach essay writing, and argumentative writing in particular requires students not only to communicate effectively but also to take a stance on a topic and support it. Argumentative writing often requires students to pull together many of the skills we cover in an ELA class—reading, critical thinking, and writing—and there’s really no limit to how much students can grow in terms of sophistication, both in ideas and in expression.

Because students must attempt to master so many skills at once, our go-to tool anytime we set out to teach essay writing is a structured outline that our students can use and apply on any argumentative writing assignment. Using this structured outline (which relies on our 5C paragraph format) allows our students to focus on developing the quality of their ideas rather than feeling overwhelmed by all the choices they need to make in structuring and developing their argument. It gives them a starting place that they can build on and, with practice, internalize.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the choices we need to help students make when we teach essay writing, particularly argumentative essay writing, read on as we break down everything you need to know and share an argumentative essay outline you can use with your students.

Argumentative vs. Persuasive Writing

Before we dive deep into the elements of an argumentative essay outline, there is quite a bit of confusion about the terminology we use to describe this genre of writing. Depending on your textbook, content standards, or personal experience, you may hear argumentative writing and persuasive writing used interchangeably (or, even more confusingly, listed as separate genres).

We’ll be perfectly honest: we used the terms interchangeably for years, ultimately landing on argumentative writing because that’s the terminology used in the Common Core standards. And while this was fine for our novice writers, there are subtle differences between the two types of writing.

We can break this difference down into five categories:

Goal

In argumentative writing, our goal is to get the reader to recognize that our position is valid and deserving of consideration as one of potentially many perspectives. In persuasive writing, however, our goal is to get the reader to agree with our position, viewing other positions as wrong.

Starting Point

When writing an argumentative essay, we want to explore all perspectives before deciding upon (and then arguing for) the position with the most evidence to support it. When writing a persuasive essay, however, we likely already have a position, and we’re looking for evidence to support it.

Technique

In an argumentative essay, we rely on multiple pieces of evidence with strong, relevant commentary to demonstrate that our position is reasonable and valid. In a persuasive essay, we may do this, but we may also rely heavily on emotional appeals to sway our reader to our position.

Perspective

Writers of argumentative essays present multiple positions to show that they exist, to demonstrate that the writer is fair-minded in considering all perspectives, and to place their own opinion in conversation with those perspectives, pointing out the weaknesses of other perspectives and how their own position addresses those. Writers of persuasive essays are primarily focused on their own perspective, easily dismissing opposing viewpoints.

Attitude

While argumentative essays are arguing for a position, they still tend to be more objective and formal: the writer is merely presenting a position that is worthy of consideration rather than trying to convince the reader to adopt that position. Persuasive essays, because their goal is to persuade, tend to be more informal, relying more heavily on personal opinion and actively shaping the argument to appeal to a specific audience.

There is certainly value in teaching students both writing types, but when we teach essay writing, we prefer to focus on argument, saving any discussion of persuasion (e.g., logos, ethos, and pathos) for a nonfiction reading unit. We want our students to master the skills necessary to write a strong, logically-defended argument (whether it’s about literature or another topic) and the skills necessary to recognize when they’re being manipulated by someone else’s attempts at persuasion, but we’re less concerned with whether they can manipulate an audience to agree with them.

Key Skills to Emphasize When You Teach Argumentative Writing

Many of the elements that we focus on in argumentative writing are the key elements in any writing type, but they tend to be especially important in argumentative writing because without them, it is nearly impossible to construct a convincing argument.

Thesis Statements

It’s unlikely that you’ve ever encountered an argumentative essay rubric that doesn’t include a strong thesis statement as one of its criteria. And this makes sense: the point of an argument is to present and then argue for a central claim.

Novice writers need help crafting a claim that is actually arguable, that goes beyond merely restating the prompt to actually answer the question and take a unique stance.

More advanced writers need help moving beyond the formulaic claim-plus-three-reasons format, developing an overall argument that incorporates their sub-points without necessarily listing them out.

Line of Reasoning

Most argumentative essay rubrics also emphasize the importance of a strong line of reasoning: yes, the essay needs to have some sort of organizational structure, but it needs to go beyond that to actually build an argument that progresses logically from one idea to the next.

Novice writers need help developing an organizational strategy and selecting appropriate transitions to connect those ideas together, while more advanced writers need help developing a more sophisticated strategy than “here are three reasons to support my claim” and less formulaic transitions between ideas.

Quality Evidence

Because the key to an argumentative essay is convincing the reader that your position is valid and worthy of consideration, the quality and credibility of evidence is essential. 

Novice writers need help including actual facts and evidence as examples rather than their own opinions; from there, growing writers can work on anything from appropriate punctuation, integration, and citations to establishing the credibility of their sources to selecting the best evidence rather than merely any evidence.

Strong Context and Commentary

To build an effective line of reasoning that convinces a reader, students must learn to write strong commentary that connects each piece of evidence to their claims and subclaims. In our 5C paragraph structure, we’ve found it helpful to encourage students to incorporate context as part of their commentary, giving background information on each piece of evidence so the reader can more fully understand it before connecting it to the larger claims.

As is the case with evidence, this is a skill that can be introduced and then improved upon through a student’s entire journey through our classrooms.

Presenting and Refuting Counterarguments or Objections

The one skill that is entirely unique to argumentative writing is the inclusion of counterarguments or objections. It seems counterintuitive to incorporate perspectives that disagree with your own; however, our students need to learn that doing so actually strengthens their own writing by demonstrating that they have thoroughly researched or considered the issue and taken multiple perspectives into account.

But many of our students stop there, merely integrating a counterargument without refuting it, which often means that they write two paragraphs in support of their thesis statement and then one that undermines everything they have already written. Students need to learn that the opposing viewpoint should only take up a sentence or two, and then their attention must turn to arguing why this counterargument or objection should be dismissed or is outweighed by the strength of their own argument.

This is a tough skill to learn and one that students can become increasingly more skilled at as they move from grade level to grade level.

Helping Students Structure an Argumentative Essay

While an experienced writer’s argument itself will drive the organization of their essay, many of our students are far from experienced. Our novice writers need explicit instructions on how to organize an essay, and our growing writers need suggestions and guidance on how to move beyond these early formulaic approaches. This is where we’ve found providing students with an argumentative essay outline is essential: it offers them guidance so they can prioritize the quality of their ideas, but it’s also flexible enough to grow with students as their writing becomes more sophisticated.

We promised at the outset that we’d provide you with our go-to structured outline to teach essay writing, and our 5C approach to writing body paragraphs works perfectly for argumentative writing along with our recommendations for writing an introduction and conclusion.

Introduction

Hook:

Any piece of writing must grab the reader’s attention while introducing them to the topic of the essay, and students often struggle to come up with a meaningful hook. We’ve found it helpful to offer students a choice between an anecdote, a generalization, a startling fact, and a quotation (and we’ve put together a mini-lesson on these hook types if your students need some practice!).

Context:

Before jumping right into the argument, good writers help their reader situate the argument in a larger context by providing background information. This might take the form of addressing the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why), providing statistics to show the scope of the problem or issue, or presenting competing perspectives on the issue.

Thesis:

Of course, students need to end their introduction with a strong thesis statement that clearly answers the question in the prompt and addresses his significance (or the “So What?”). The reader should finish the introduction not only knowing what the writer will argue but why that argument matters.

Organizing the Body Paragraphs

There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to organizing the body paragraphs of an argumentative essay, but we can certainly give our students some options as they mature.

Our beginning writers often do well with a basic five-paragraph essay structure in which they make a claim and then provide three reasons (one per body paragraph) to support that claim. Students can order these reasons logically (i.e., one follows from another), chronologically (especially for a literary argument), or in order of strength or value (increasing or decreasing).

As our students become stronger writers, they will benefit from learning to think through what subclaims they must make to support their argument and then ordering those subclaims effectively so that they build logically upon one another. This is challenging, however, and many of our students don’t quite make it to this point by the end of high school (which is okay).

Incorporating the Counterargument

There are two approaches to incorporating the counterargument. Both are equally valid, but as with much of the advice here, one approach is more appropriate for beginning writers and the other approach for more experienced writers.

Beginning writers often find it easiest to make the counterargument its own paragraph: they present the counterargument in the topic sentence, and then they use the rest of the paragraph to refute that counterargument, either by pointing out flaws in the evidence that would support that argument or by providing evidence that counters it.

Stronger writers, however, will benefit from learning to address potential counterarguments or objections within each body paragraph as part of their commentary. Addressing those counterarguments immediately when they come up for the reader strengthens the argument, and most arguments have more than one counterargument or objection that needs to be addressed.

Body Paragraphs

For each body paragraph, students can follow the 5C format:

Claim:

Each body paragraph should begin with a subclaim, or a statement that clearly identifies the part of the thesis that will be developed within that paragraph.

Concrete Evidence:

Students should then support the claim in the previous sentence by providing a correctly integrated and cited direct quotation from a reputable source. Even if students are writing in a timed situation and don’t have access to sources, they should learn to include facts here rather than their own opinions and ideas.

Context:

After providing evidence, students should provide readers with background details or additional information that will help establish or explain the importance of the details included in the quotation. It’s helpful to provide details about the author’s credibility or the study in which the evidence was gathered; as the essay builds, students may find it helpful to draw connections between a piece of evidence and earlier pieces of evidence.

Commentary:

Students need to explicitly connect the piece of evidence in the paragraph to their claim, explaining how that specific piece of evidence supports the claim and often addressing the implications or significance of that part of the argument.

Connection:

Students can build a bridge between each body paragraph by explaining the connection between the evidence they just presented and the evidence they will present in the next paragraph. When writing the final body paragraph, students can use this sentence to begin zooming back out toward the larger generalizations they will make in the conclusion.

For our beginning writers, one piece of evidence per paragraph was about what they could handle. For our more experienced writers, however, we often had them incorporate two pieces of evidence in each body paragraph, which means that after their claim, concrete evidence, context, and commentary sentences, they would include a transition to a second chain of concrete evidence, context, and commentary sentences before wrapping up with the connection sentence that leads into the next paragraph.

Conclusion

Restate Thesis:

Students should begin the conclusion by reminding readers of their overall claim but without directly restating the original thesis. If students are struggling to do this, encourage them to consider connecting the best insight from one of their commentary sentences to their original thesis statement to reinforce the strength of their argument.

Synthesis:

Students should discuss the implications of the ideas presented in their argument for the larger community, whether those are benefits of taking the student’s position or problems that may arise from failing to do so.

So What:

Students should conclude their essay by making it clear for the reader why this topic is worthy of discussion. This might look like considering how the reader, the community, or the society at large would benefit from considering the student’s perspective.

Our students will truly benefit from repeated explicit instruction and practice with argumentative writing through their educational journey. It’s a form of writing they will revisit regardless of their future major, and it really allows them to develop the skills we consider most valuable when we teach essay writing. But when there are so many skills to develop, it can be helpful to give students a starting place, which is why we’ve found our go-to argument essay outline to be useful with students in a variety of grades and at a variety of levels.

Implement this structure the next time you teach essay writing with our Argumentative Writing Essay Outline. The product includes a teacher presentation that walks students through the structure presented here and provides a sample essay to illustrate what each sentence should look like, a visually attractive outline of the argumentative essay structure that students can keep in their binders (or that you can post on their LMS), and a graphic organizer students can use to draft their own argument in this format. We’ve provided multiple versions of these projects so you can decide which option for incorporating a counterargument will work best for you and your students.

If you have any questions about what we’ve shared here or you’ve implemented our ideas and want to share how it went, we’d love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.