Gloom. Despair. Grief. Fear.
There was a violent earthquake. Angels. Soldiers who fainted.
Then—joy! Amazement! Rejoicing!
This week is Holy Week for Christians. We remember and celebrate Jesus’ Triumphal Entry, Last Supper, trial, death, and resurrection.
The historical accounts of the resurrection in the Bible mention
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I love to bring you examples of effective writing so your students can use them, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of the U. S. Congress is an excellent example of persuasive writing. He used many powerful strategies in his speech, five of which we’ll delve into today.
Your students will better understand the intricacies of writing when they have the chance to learn from professional examples of published authors and speechmakers, so, to that end, let’s explore the persuasion tactics Netanyahu used.
Below are five powerful persuasion techniques. After the list, you’ll find a family writing prompt that involves one of them.
To read the complete transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, click here. .
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You are familiar with topic sentences, how they come at the beginning of paragraphs and tell readers what the paragraph is all about.
But what if the topic sentence came at the end of the paragraph? And what if that paragraph described something from a story?
Here’s part of a paragraph from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Notice the topic sentence at the end of the description:
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In 1961, famous American poet Robert Frost did something no other poet had ever done.
He read one of his poems for a presidential inauguration. John F. Kennedy personally asked Frost to read a poem for the inauguration, and Frost recited his famous poem “The Gift Outright.”
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Are you wearing green?
Saint Patrick, whom we celebrate March 17, is famous for teaching the ancient Irish about Christianity in the fifth century.
Legend has it that in order to teach people about the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), Patrick used a three-leaf shamrock to show how each leaf is separate but also part of the same plant.
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Japanese scientists are hot on the trail of the extinct wooly mammoth’s DNA, which is available from tissue preserved in Russia. What do they want to do with the DNA?
They want to clone it and, in about five years, make a modern mammoth.
Ryan Phelan of Revive & Restore would like to bring back
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In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, four old friends who have wasted their lives are given water from the supposed Fountain of Youth. After they drink the water, the three men begin to fight over the woman, whom they all had fancied in their youth, and in their tussling, they knock over the vase with the precious water.
Dr. Heidegger learns his lesson. He is finished with trying to make people young again, but the three old folks come away from the experiment with a different idea. They want to travel to Florida to drink from the original Fountain of Youth. You can read the whole clever story here.
By the way, I’ve drunk from the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine, Florida. The water tastes like it has sulfur in it (stinky-egg scent). And I can assure you that it has not worked.
Nathaniel Hawthorne never could have imagined a real company that freezes people to somehow revive them later. Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona, freezes bodies in the hopes of
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Jules Verne, considered one of the fathers of science-fiction (sci-fi), liked to write about going places people couldn’t actually go to or had not been before.
He wrote about exploring the core of the earth in Journey to the Center of the Earth. His fantastic tale 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea takes readers deep, deep into the ocean in a submarine, a fairly new invention. From the Earth to the Moon shoots adventurers to the moon in a metal rocket long before space travel had been invented.
Sci-fi writers like to
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Melba was fifteen years old when she was chased by men who wanted to hang her. It was the first day of racial integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957, and fighting for her life was just the first of her year of torture at the hands of students, parents, teachers, and members of the town.
And when I say torture, I mean
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If you had been alive during the time of the American Revolutionary War and had the chance to secrete something for others to discover centuries later, what would you have put into your box?
It turns out that two famous men from that period created a time capsule and placed it inside one of the cornerstones of the Massachusetts State House in Boston in 1795, and the box was recently found. You can read more about how it was found here.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, was honored to open this special time capsule to find out what was in it. Here’s a list of items found in the brass box:
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