Writing A Short Story with a Persuasive Letter

In this lesson, the students will use their persuasive letter they wrote in relation to And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. The letter was inviting someone to come to their island. The only thing they cannot mention in the letter is the reason they are invited.

Procedure

First, you need to explain to them about persuasive writing if they haven't done the assignment on persuasive letter writing. Persuasive writing is when someone attempts to convince another person to do something or to see things from his perspective. For example, one of the characters may think it's okay to lie, but the main character doesn't, so he attempts to convince the other one to see the consequences of lying as opposed to telling the truth.

In the writing assignment on persuasive letter writing, the students were to convince a stranger to come to the island, but they couldn't explain their real reason for the invitation. Now, students are to use the persuasive letter and include it in their own short story about their own island.

After the students understand about persuasive writing and what they are to do with their assignment, as they write their persuasive letter, they can also enhance their letter by adding some fictional dialogue that will help to convince the person to accept the invitation. After the students have written their persuasive letters, they can write their short story about their island and include the persuasive letter. They need to make this short story suspenseful.

You can grade the students on their oral performance and on how well they wrote their papers. You can grade them on sentence structure, paragraph structure, grammar, spelling, and punctuation.