Evaluating Two Persuasive Texts on the Same Issue
Students are given two short texts arguing about a proposed 10pm curfew for under-18s in a town of 25,000. Text A is a 250-word opinion piece by a local shop owner. It uses one statistic ("shoplifting rose 14% last year"), an anecdote about a broken window, and the phrase "decent people are fed up". Text B is a 300-word piece by a youth worker. It cites a council report showing that 80% of youth crime occurs before 7pm, includes two quotes from teenagers, and ends with a question: "If the problem happens earlier, why punish later?" Students must evaluate which text is more persuasive and why. Several students write that Text B is better "because it uses facts", without examining either text's use of evidence, emotion or structure. The teacher wants to move them beyond a simple facts-versus-feelings judgement.
1. Explain why the judgement "Text B is better because it uses facts" is an incomplete evaluation, referring to specific features of both texts.
Read the worked answer
The judgement treats "facts" as a single quality that settles the question, but persuasion depends on how evidence is selected, framed and combined with other appeals. Text B's 80% figure is stronger evidence than Text A's 14% figure because it directly addresses the curfew's logic: if most incidents happen before 7pm, a 10pm curfew targets the wrong time. However, Text B also persuades through selection and framing: it chooses a council report and two teenager quotes that support its case, and its closing rhetorical question is an emotional and logical appeal, not a fact. Text A, meanwhile, uses a statistic that is relevant but ambiguous (a 14% rise says nothing about timing), an anecdote that creates sympathy for the shop owner, and loaded language ("decent people") that divides the audience into us and them. A complete evaluation weighs evidence quality, relevance, emotional appeal and structure together.
2. A student claims Text A is "unfair" because it uses emotion. Explain whether using emotion makes a persuasive text weak, using both texts as examples.
Read the worked answer
Emotion is not automatically a weakness; it becomes a weakness when it replaces reasoning or misleads the reader. Text A's anecdote about the broken window is a legitimate way to make an abstract issue concrete, and it may accurately represent the shop owner's experience. The problem is that the anecdote is asked to carry more weight than it can: one broken window cannot establish a town-wide trend, and the phrase "decent people are fed up" implies that opponents are indecent, which pressures the reader rather than reasoning with them. Text B also uses emotion, through the voices of teenagers and the closing question, but those choices support a claim already grounded in a relevant statistic. The useful distinction is therefore not emotion versus fact but whether the emotional appeal is proportionate and consistent with the evidence. A student who simply labels emotion as unfair misses this distinction and cannot explain why one text persuades more effectively.
3. Design an evaluation framework the students could apply to both texts, and show how it would produce a defensible conclusion.
Read the worked answer
A workable framework has four questions. First, relevance: does the evidence address the actual proposal? Text B's timing statistic does; Text A's 14% figure does not establish that a 10pm curfew would help. Second, sufficiency: is one statistic or one anecdote enough to support the claim? Neither text offers much, but Text B adds a report and multiple voices. Third, framing and language: what does the word choice ask the reader to feel? Text A's "decent people" divides the audience; Text B's question invites the reader to reason. Fourth, structure: does the argument build towards a clear position? Text B moves from evidence to voices to a concluding challenge, while Text A moves from statistic to anecdote to indignation. Applying all four, a defensible conclusion is that Text B is more persuasive on this specific question because its evidence is more relevant and its emotional appeals support rather than substitute for reasoning, while acknowledging that Text A's anecdote effectively humanises the issue.