The Persuasive Piece That Forgot Its Reader
A student writes a 250-word persuasive piece in Macedonian for the writing task. The prompt asks students to persuade the school council to fund a Macedonian-language debating club. The draft opens with 'Мислам дека треба да има клуб' and lists five reasons the student personally likes debating. It uses only first-person statements, no address to the council, no counterargument, and ends with 'Тоа е сè.' The teacher's feedback notes that the Macedonian is largely accurate but the register is conversational, with contractions and colloquial fillers. The student has one rewrite opportunity and wants to keep all five reasons.
1. Identify the two biggest problems with the draft and explain why each matters for this task type.
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The two biggest problems are audience awareness and argument structure. Audience: the piece addresses no one. A persuasive text to a school council must position the reader as the decision-maker, using direct address and framing reasons as benefits to the school, not as personal preferences. 'Мислам дека треба' signals opinion, not persuasion. Structure: five parallel personal reasons with no counterargument and no conclusion reads as a list, not an argument. Persuasive writing is judged on whether it moves a specific reader, so acknowledging a likely objection (cost, timetabling) and answering it is worth more than a sixth reason. Register matters too, but it is secondary to these two.
2. The student insists on keeping all five reasons. How should the rewrite be organised within 250 words?
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Keep all five but subordinate them. Open with one sentence that names the audience and the ask ('Почитуван училишен совет, предлагам...'). Then group the five reasons into two or three clusters, giving the strongest cluster two sentences and the others one each. Insert one short counterargument-and-answer pair, for example acknowledging cost and noting volunteer staffing. Close with a direct request and a concrete next step. This fits roughly: 30 words opening, 120 words reasons, 50 words counterargument, 40 words closing, with a few words of margin. The five reasons survive, but the reader now has a hierarchy and a decision to make.
3. What specific register changes should the rewrite make, and why do they matter for the mark?
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Replace conversational openers and fillers with formal framing: 'Мислам дека' becomes a direct proposal; 'Тоа е сè' becomes a closing request. Remove contractions and colloquial particles that belong to speech. Use formal address consistently and avoid the first person singular as the organising principle, shifting to 'ние' or to the school as beneficiary. These changes matter because writing tasks assess control of register alongside accuracy; a text can be grammatically clean and still lose marks for sounding like a message to a friend. The rewrite should read as a short formal proposal, which is the register the prompt's audience implies.