Persuasive Essays

Everyone at some point has seen the commercials on television advertising random, useless products. The commercials are terrible and you usually only watch about five seconds of it before continuing to the next channel, and yet these companies sell millions of products a year. How do they do it? They could be adept hypnotists, skilled in mind control, but it’s much more likely that they have simply mastered the method of persuasion. Persuasion is a technique used by many to sway an individual’s idea of something or someone. There are many different ways to present persuasion, but one of the more common displays is in writing. The short story Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs by Stephen Jay Gould is a perfect example of a persuasive essay.

            In his story Gould persuades the reader that the extinction of dinosaurs was brought on by three central occurrences millions of years ago. The first theory of extinction is sex. Gould explains that there are some speculations that temperatures at the end of the Cretaceous period were raised slightly, which created an environment that was too warm for male dinosaurs to produce sperm, and therefore they merely died out from the inability to produce offspring. Gould provides many facts gathered from scientific studies that have been performed for this theory.

                The second theory that Gould argues is drugs. In this approach dinosaurs were thought to have “overdosed” on flowering plants that were consumed by them millions of years ago, and were killed when the dinosaur livers were too small to detoxify their bodies from all the psychotive agents they had ingested. Gould includes quotes from prestigous scientists that concur with this theory, which influences the reader to further agree with his concept of drug-addicted dino’s.

            The third and final theory is the proposal of disasters. Most of us are familiar with the hypothesis that a massive comet or asteroid collided with Earth and created enough dust to completely block out the sun. With the sun the block plants were unable to photosynthesize, causing them to die and with no plants, the basis of nearly all food chains, the dinosaurs starved. Gould also added that the dust cloud had the potential to drastically lower temperatures world wide resulting in dinosaurs, and possibly many other organsisms, becoming extinct. Once again, Gould uses scientific facts to persuade the reader that this is a viable hypothesis to the extinction of dinosaurs.

            Persuasion is a method that requires the skill and compassion to sway someone’s opinion, making it your own. Being only a small step away from manipulation, it takes time and a lot of practice before you can shape the mind of the reader or listener into exactly what you want. Always remember to be sincere and know your facts, and you’ll be spinning your own persuasive yarn in no time.