Strategies and Modes
Description: Provides details about how something looks, feels, tastes, smells, sounds, and makes one feel
Used for:
- Narrative—add details to bring personal or fictional experiences to life
- Informative—illustrate a specific person, place, thing, event, or concept
- Argumentative—offer concrete evidence to support your claim
- Persuasive—make your cause more tangible to your audience
Narration: Tells a story
Used for:
- Narrative—illustrate a progression of events
- Informative—articulate steps in a process
- Argumentative—provide anecdotal evidence for your claim
- Persuasive—use stories to appeal to your audience
Definition: Defines a specific term, for example, abstract concepts like justice, truth, or love
Used for:
- Informative—explain important terms and concepts
- Argumentative—clarify terms and concepts central to your claim
- Persuasive— explain relevant terms and concepts the way you want the reader to understand them
Comparison/Contrast: Take innovative connections and/or express unexpected differences between two things, people, places, or concepts
Used for:
- Informative—illustrate the likenesses and/or disparities between two items, people, locations, or ideas
- Argumentative—use accepted associations to strengthen your claim or challenge conventional similarities and differences to defend an assertion
- Persuasive—present new associations and question accepted relationships in order to change your audience’s outlook and behavior
Pro/Con: Addresses the positives and negatives of a policy or course of action
Used for:
- Informative—offer a balanced, unbiased overview of an issue
- Argumentative—acknowledge and address the opposing points of view
- Persuasive—anticipate and mitigate objections to your proposal
Cause and Effect: Explains why or how some event happened, and what resulted from the event
Used for:
- Informative—explore the consequence(s) of a cause or the cause(s) of an event
- Argumentative—argue that one event caused another or that an event or events will cause others
- Persuasive—convince your audience to change their behavior in order to cause or avoid a specific effect
Synthesis: Combines information from several sources to investigate, explain, or draw a conclsion about a topic
Used for:
- Informative—examine an event or theory while incorporating multiple sources
- Argumentative—compare different views and support a coherent claim
- Persuasive—marshal information to further your agenda
Analysis: Moves beyond a summary of information, describe how the elements of an article, story, etc. work together for a purpose
Used for:
- Informative—dissect a piece of writing to show how it works
- Argumentative—scrutinize existing arguments in order to build your own claim while dismantling the opposition’s
- Persuasive—increase credibility with your audience by examining other perspectives on the issue
