It's no fun announcing an argument paper and being met by groans. If your English students have arrived at your class afraid of essays, you're not the only one. And we all know, buy-in matters. When students are confronted with a task they're horrified by, it's hard for them to access their skills and motivation to do their best work. So what are you supposed to do when you hit the groan skid?

Today I want to talk about some on-ramps and side paths to the argument highway. Visual tools and modern mediums to help you help your students realize argument isn't so scary.

By the way, an extremely step-by-step process with lots of modeling is a classic go-to for breaking down the essay writing process and making it feel manageable, and I don't want to ignore that. Brainstorming. Outlining. Drafting. Peer editing. Self editing stations. Final drafting. That's all wonderful.

But probably you do that already, and you're still here.

So let's explore some other approaches you can use to complement that oh-so-valid step-by-step process that just doesn't always work to help ELA students get past their paper-writing fears.

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