Opinion without the megaphone

An opinion column in a school paper has an awkward job. The writer is a student, the readers are students, and the people with the power to change whatever is being argued about are usually adults who may or may not read it. Volume does not help. What helps is evidence the reader did not have before, and a writer who sounds like she has considered the other side for longer than a sentence.

The Light ran a lot of opinion writing over ten years: columns, two-sided debates, reviews that were really arguments. A handful of them show the moves that make a student argument persuasive, and a few show the moves that quietly undercut it.

Report first, then argue

The strongest column in the archive may be Opinion: My Grades are Not My Identity, from December 2016. Its claim is simple: students check the online gradebook too often, and it is hurting how they learn. A weaker column would have said that and then said it louder.

This one goes and gets proof. It explains what the faculty's monthly Professional Learning Communities had been discussing, quotes an assistant principal saying teachers can see students checking "3-4 times a day, sometimes," and then lets classmates report their own habits. Only after all that does the writer argue. By then the reader has already half agreed.

Two smaller choices in the same column deserve credit. The writer quotes the administration's counterpoint fairly: colleges want to see grades, so the school cannot simply stop giving them. And near the end she discloses that she helped design and hand out the stickers promoting the "#quitpowerschool" idea she is writing about. That sentence costs her nothing and buys a lot of trust. If you are part of the thing you are arguing for, say so.

One thing to fix if you borrow the structure: in the archived copy of the original page, the line "Though grades are here to stay, students have the power to decide how to respond to them" appeared four times, almost certainly a pull quote that the website kept repeating in the body. (This archive prints it once.) In a print layout a pull quote is decoration. Online it reads as the same sentence said again. Check how your platform handles them before you publish.

The question headline, and owing the answer

Student opinion writers love a headline that ends in a question mark. The 2015 business analysis Breakfast All Day at McDonald's: Beneficial or Problematic? is a good example of keeping the promise that kind of headline makes. It interviews a franchise owner with six restaurants, walks through the kitchen problems (grills that cannot cook pancakes and beef at the same time, ovens that need time to heat), compares the price of the dearest breakfast combo with the cheapest regular one, and then lands somewhere: so far, it has worked, with real operational costs attached.

A question headline is a debt. If the piece never answers, readers feel cheated, even if they could not say why.

Using the other side's best quote

The 2014 entertainment column Who Would Be a Better Lit Teacher: Atticus Finch or Katniss Everdeen? pits classic novels against contemporary young adult fiction. Its cleverest move is a quotation from Mark Twain: "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect." The writer first uses it to praise modern authors who broke with convention, then turns it around a few paragraphs later to question the crowded shelves of dystopian and vampire novels. One line, used in both directions, shows the reader that the writer is thinking rather than cheering.

The same column shows how to bring in evidence lightly. It notes that J.K. Rowling has named Shakespeare and Jane Austen as favorites, and that John Green credits Melville and Fitzgerald. If the best contemporary writers read the classics, the argument goes, the classics are not the enemy. That is a better closing argument than any adjective.

Where the evidence runs out

Compare Homework: Less is More or More is Less?, from 2015. It opens well, with a published finding and the familiar guideline from the National Education Association's site of about ten minutes of homework per night per grade level. It interviews two teachers about how they handle homework before exams and asks several students what helps them study.

Then the conclusion says that consistent homework "has led to great success." Two teachers and a handful of students who say review packets help is not evidence of that. It is evidence that some students like review packets. The fix is not to report more. It is to claim less: "the students I spoke to said..." is honest, and honesty about the size of your sample is what separates an opinion writer from a salesperson.

That gap shows up whenever a column relies on interviews alone. It is fine to argue from a few voices, as long as the conclusion is sized to match.

Two writers, one subject

The Light also ran paired pieces, two writers taking opposite sides of the same question, such as Reasons to Love Black Friday and Reasons to Hate Black Friday, or a point-counterpoint on a Marvel film. The format is good training, because each writer knows her argument will sit next to its rebuttal. It discourages cheap shots. It rewards the writer who anticipates the strongest version of the other column rather than the weakest.

If your paper tries this, give both writers the same word count and the same deadline, and do not let either read the other's draft until both are done. Otherwise the second piece becomes a reply instead of an argument.

A working checklist for the opinion page

• State the claim in one sentence in the first paragraph. If you cannot, you are not ready to write the column.
• Bring at least one fact your readers did not have: a number, a policy, a quote from someone with authority over the issue.
• Quote the best version of the opposing view, and answer it.
• Disclose your own stake.
• Match the size of your conclusion to the size of your evidence.

Not one of those rules asks a writer to be less passionate. They make passion easier to believe, which is the whole point of putting an opinion in print.