Unit 5: Argumentative Writing

Updated: January, 2021

To learn more about our full writing curriculum, visit our overview.

Unit Overview

Right now, the concept of “student voice” is having a moment.

Thanks to the work of people like Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, the Parkland students and the youth-led protests for Black Lives Matter, the power young people can wield when they stand up for a cause is clear.

On our site, we’ve been offering teenagers ways to tell the world what they think for over 20 years. Our student writing prompt forums encourage them to weigh in on current events and issues daily, while our Student Editorial Contest has offered an annual outlet since 2014 for formalizing those opinions into evidence-based essays.

Now we’re bringing together all the resources we’ve developed along the way to help students figure out what they want to say, and how to say it effectively.

Here is what this unit offers, but we would love to hear from both teachers and students if there is more we could include. Let us know in the comments, or by writing to LNFeedback@nytimes.com.

Start With Our Prompts for Argumentative Writing

How young is too young to use social media?

Should students get mental health days off from school?

Is $1 billion too much money for any one person to have?

These are the kinds of questions we ask every day on our site. In 2017 we published a list of 401 Prompts for Argumentative Writing. , a categorized list that contains This year, we’ve followed it up with 300 Questions and Images to Inspire Argument Writing, which catalogs all our argument-focused Student Opinion prompts since then, plus our more accessible Picture Prompts.

Teachers tell us their students love looking at these lists, both to inspire their own writing and to find links to reliable sources about the issues that intrigue them. In fact, every year we get many contest submissions that grow directly out of these questions. Several, like this one, have even gone on to win.

But even if you’re not participating in our contest, you might use these prompts to invite the kind of casual, low-stakes writing that can help your students build skills — in developing their voices, making claims and backing them up with solid reasoning and evidence.

And, if your students respond to our most recent prompts by posting comments on our site, they can also practice making arguments for an authentic audience of fellow students from around the world. Each week we choose our favorites to honor in our Current Events Conversation column.

Find Lesson Plans on Every Aspect of Argument Writing

Over the years, we’ve published quite a few lesson plans to support our Editorial Contest — so many, in fact, that we finally rounded them all up into one easy list.

In “10 Ways to Teach Argument-Writing With The New York Times,” you’ll find resources for:

• Exploring the role of a newspaper opinion section

• Understanding the difference between fact and opinion

• Analyzing the use of rhetorical strategies like ethos, pathos and logos

• Working with claims, evidence and counterarguments

• Helping students discover the issues that matter to them

• Breaking out of the “echo chamber” when researching hot-button issues

• Experimenting with visual argument-making

Teach and Learn With Mentor Texts

You probably already know that you can find arguments to admire — and “writer’s moves” to emulate — all over the Times Opinion section. But have you thought about using the work of our previous Student Editorial Contest winners as mentor texts too?

Here are ways to use both:

• Learn from the Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof’s writing process: Our latest edition of our “Annotated by the Author” Mentor Text series is by Mr. Kristof. See what he has to say about the writing challenges he faced in a recent column and how he did the kinds of things students will have to do, too, from fact-checking to fixing grammar errors to balancing storytelling with making a larger point.

• Get to know one writer’s rhetorical style: Many teachers use an “adopt a columnist” method, inviting students to focus on the work of one of the 16 Times Op-Ed writers — Charles M. Blow, Jamelle Bouie, David Brooks, Frank Bruni, Gail Collins, Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Michelle Goldberg, Nicholas Kristof, Paul Krugman, David Leonhardt, Farhad Manjoo, Jennifer Senior and Bret Stephens — to get to know his or her issues and rhetorical style. In 2019, an English teacher in Connecticut wrote for our site about how he does this exercise, in which his students choose from among columnists at The Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

• Use the work of teenage winners to help your students identify “writer’s moves” they can borrow: Teachers have told us there is no better way to prepare students to enter our contest than to have them examine the work of previous winners. On our current site, you can find the essays of the top winners and the runners-up from 2017-2020. Invite your students to read one and answer the questions we pose in all our Mentor Texts columns: “What do you notice or admire about this piece? What lessons might it have for your writing?” Then, have them borrow one or more of this student’s “writer’s moves” and imitate it in their own work.

  We have also just published the first-ever Learning Network books, one that collects 100 of the best student essays from this contest all in one place, categorized by subjects like “Teenage Life Online,” “Gender and Sexuality” and “Sports and Gaming,” and the other a related teacher’s guide to using them in the classroom.

• Coming soon: Some new entries in our Annotated By the Author series, featuring student winners from 2020 discussing their work and sharing tips.

Get Practical Tips From Our Related Videos and Webinars

• The video above, “How to Write an Editorial,” is only three minutes long, but in it Andy Rosenthal, the former editor of the Times Opinion page, gives students seven great pieces of advice.

• You can register now for our free Feb. 11 webinar, Teaching Argumentative Writing, that will focus on two key steps in the process: finding your argument, and using evidence to support it.

• Or, watch our on-demand 2020 webinar, “Teach Argumentative Writing With Our Student Editorial Contest,” to get a broad overview of how to use our writing prompts and the work of our student winners to help your own students find topics they care about, and craft solid arguments around them.

• Finally, both students and teachers are welcome to watch our popular on-demand 2017 webinar, “Write to Change the World: Crafting Persuasive Pieces With Help From Nicholas Kristof and the Times Op-Ed Page,” which includes a wealth of practical tips from Mr. Kristof, as well as from Kabby Hong, a Wisconsin English teacher who works with this contest annually, and his student, Daina Kalnina, whose 2017 essay was one of our top winners that year.

Enter Our Seventh Annual Student Editorial Contest: Feb. 23-April 13, 2021

The culmination of this unit? Our Eighth Annual Student Editorial Contest, of course.

You can find all the information you need, plus the entry form, here just as soon as the contest begins.

As always, all student work will be read by our staff, volunteers from the Times Opinion section, and/or by educators from around the country. Winners will have their work published on our site and, perhaps, in the print New York Times.