Presenting your opinion either in a written form or during a live discussion requires practice and preparation. Learning how to do this persuasively and constructively is important in different fields, from studies and academics to editorials and opinion pieces in newspapers. Ground your opinions in facts and evidence. These opinion writing prompts will help you choose the best topic for opinion essay writing, editorial, op-ed, letter to the editor, or other opinion piece.
Tip: use each prompt to practice opinion essay writing once or twice a week. As a result, you will learn to express your views and arguments in a structured way and to analyze issues.
Table of Contents
- Benefits of Using These Opinion Writing Prompts
- Types of Opinion Pieces of Writing
- How to Come up with an Opinion Writing Prompt
- List of Opinion Writing Prompts
1. Benefits of Using These Opinion Writing Prompts
Practice writing opinion pieces to get the following benefits:
- Develop your critical thinking: writing your opinions is a great though-provoking practice to think about burning issues, analyze them from different perspectives, and create convincing arguments.
- Learn how to create persuasive arguments: opinion writing can help you learn how to use persuasive techniques to back up your opinions
- Understand yourself better: these opinion writing prompts serve as a great tool to help you understand your thoughts better. You can evaluate your values because you provide your opinions through the lens of your values and perceptions of the world. Write short opinion pieces in your journal for personal growth.
- Engage in a constructive dialogue, online discussion, or conversation: learning how to express your opinions can boost your social interaction.
- Prepare for a live discussion: practicing how to express your opinions can help you prepare for a convincing live discussion of burning topics.
- Make you more confident while presenting opinions in front of the audience.
- Develop your writing style and research skills: writing opinions requires analyzing different perspectives to come up with a convincing opinion; as a result, you can improve your analytical thinking through analyzing these points of view. Writing such pieces requires research to support your opinions. Thus, you develop your research skills. Of course, the more you write, the better your writing style becomes.
2. Types of Opinion Pieces of Writing
You can write your opinions in the following forms:
- Opinion essay
- Editorial or opinion piece
- Op-ed
- Letter to the editor
- Reflection in the journal
- Blog post
- Social media excerpt
- Comments
If you are a publisher or editor on a blog, present your opinions in the form of an editorial or opinion piece. It is an article written by an editor expressing their opinions.
If you are a reader of such blogs or newspapers, you can write an op-ed (a long-form article presenting personal comments) or a letter to the editor (a short comment).
Writing an opinion essay, create an introduction presenting the topic on which you want to provide your opinion. End it with a thesis statement presenting your opinion and enumerate points supporting it. Think of different aspects of the topic and discuss them one per body paragraph: present the topic and add your opinion. Summarize your convincing arguments to support your opinion in conclusion.
These phrases can help you start writing your opinions for any piece of writing.
3. How to Come up with an Opinion Writing Prompt
There are several ways in which you can come up with an opinion writing prompt on your own. You can use it to write a blog post, an essay, or a commentary. Thus, consider the following steps:
- Think of a broader topic or field: it can be technology, finances, psychology, literature and writing, social issues, environment, healthcare and well-being, ethics, education, culture, entertainment, politics, legal issues, economics, etc.
- Search for news in the chosen field: the chosen topic category can help you find recent news on preferred news websites.
- Pick the news article of interest: read the article and take notes of your opinions and thoughts about issues discussed therein.
- Research and find evidence that support your opinion: think critically about the strong and weak points of such evidence.
- Find evidence of the opposite opinions: acknowledge and discuss counterarguments.
- Evaluate the strength of your opinion against contrary thoughts: compare evidence for and against and highlight why the evidence supporting your position are stronger than those that back up opposing statements.
4. List of Opinion Writing Prompts
The lit above presents prompts on 10 topic categories, prompting you to reflect on different issues:
- Benefits and harm of technologies
- Personal data use
- Substitution of human work and tasks with technology
- Rights of robots and artificial intelligence (AI) and the overall regulation of these technologies
- Social media and video game addiction
- The use of AI tools instead of teachers
- Cryptocurrencies vs. traditional money
- Issues of student loans and personal finance education
- Tips
- Social status and impact
- Personal money monitoring
- Real estate and stock investment risks
- Self-esteem under the impact of social media and ads
- Worker’s health
- Effectiveness of emotional intelligence and personality tests
- Role of positive thinking and meditation
- Impact of psychological traumas
- Themes in literature and creative writing
- Poetry in society
- Role of writing and self-publishing in education
- AI-generated writing issues
- Plagiarism and censorship
- Cultural diversity in the workplace
- Gender pay gaps
- Business communication
- Nepotism
- Parental leave
- Animal testing
- Online vs. physical activism
- Cultural appropriation
- Plastic and climate change
- Electric vehicles (EVs)
- Energy solutions
- Impact of fast fashion
- Deforestation
- Plant-based diets
- Water shortage
- Healthcare access
- Vaccinations and rights
- Mental health care role
- Alternative medicines regulation
- Euthanasia
- Smoking regulation
- Genetic experiments
- Recycling regulations
- Surveillance technology and privacy
- Whistleblowing
- Death penalty
- Education cost
- Standardized testing
- Arts and music education
- Financial literacy in education
- Grades in student assessment
- Term limits for politicians
- Lobbying
- Forms of government
- Voting age
- Drug use policies
- Policing issues
- Immigration
- Social media regulations
- Gun control
Takeaways
- Choose the broad field in which you are interested
- Narrow down your focus to a specific issue
- Choose the opinion writing prompt from the list above
- Research the topic and read news to find ideas that support or oppose your opinion
- Choose the type of writing to present your opinion: essay, blog post, editorial, op-ed, or comment
- Create an outline for your opinion points
- Consider opposing views
- Present arguments that can strengthen your opinion
- Practice writing opinion articles, essays, or posts several times a week or once to develop critical and analytical thinking, improve writing, and prepare for a live discussion
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