How To Write A Top Band Persuasive For Year 3 NAPLAN [Free Downloadable Guide]

When it comes to primary school, parents often struggle to get a clear picture of their child’s expected persuasive writing ability. How do you know your child is on the right track? Is there a way to practise persuasive writing? In this article, we’re going to show you what it takes to achieve the top band in NAPLAN persuasive writing.

Free YEAR 3 NAPLAN Persuasive Writing Guide

How to write a Band 6 persuasive piece for the Year 3 NAPLAN.

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What is Year 3 NAPLAN persuasive writing?

Most of the time, students have no trouble communicating their opinion on an issue. However, persuasive writing asks students to take this further – moving past communication, persuasive writing must be convincing.

The hard part for parents is helping children create cohesive arguments that also meet the NAPLAN marking criteria.

Firstly, we need to understand the task at hand. Students taking the Year 3 NAPLAN writing exam are given 40 minutes to write either a persuasive or narrative piece based on a prompt.

The prompt will provide an idea or issue and ask students to write about their opinions agreeing or disagreeing with the statement. It’s up to the student what stance they want to take, or whether they will argue for both sides.

What do students find difficult?

• Establishing the relationship between reader and writer
• Crafting coherent arguments with evidence
• The use of persuasive literary devices
• Sentence construction, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling, and paragraphing

Overall, establishing the relationship between writer and reader is an essential step towards writing persuasively! Students need to think about how they sound to the reader and how this will affect the way their opinions are conveyed.

Great persuasive writers take a clear position in relation to their readers’ expected values to base their argument.

Get OC exam ready with the experts!

Helping your child improve their persuasive writing

So, what can you do to help your child improve their persuasive writing skills? It all starts with the parents. We recommend parents become familiar with the NAPLAN marking criteria and learn how to provide effective feedback with our guide to evaluating persuasive writing.

Marking your child’s persuasive writing, step-by-step

Remember, it’s perfectly normal for students’ writing to contain errors at this time. In fact, it’s easy for parents to get wrapped up in grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors. While these are all important to learn, students can be overloaded with information if parents point out every single mistake in their child’s writing.

Remember to focus your feedback on small, actionable suggestions.

To make the process easier for parents and students, we’ve broken up the NAPLAN persuasive marking criteria into question-based steps. Parents should read through the marking criteria descriptions below to get an idea of what skill each criterion assesses.

Step 1: Focus on the macroscopic ideas

When marking, parents should focus on the broader ideas in the text before moving onto the finer details. A good place to start is by looking at the larger ideas and persuasive arguments put forth. These are covered under the audience and ideas sections of the marking criteria.

Ask yourself the following:

• What is my child arguing in this text?
• Does my child’s writing have a goal?
• Do I have a clear picture of what the arguments are?
• Is there evidence to support each of these arguments?
• Are the arguments linked and related to the main idea of the text?

Step 2: Text structure, paragraphing, persuasive devices, and cohesion

In this step, parents can move on to the text structure, paragraphing, persuasive devices, and cohesion sections of the marking criteria. These are all criterion testing the effectiveness of your child’s persuasive writing.

Questions you should ask yourself as the marker are:

• Does the text have a clear and definable introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion?
• Has my child used paragraphs to separate different arguments and ideas?
• Does my child attempt to consistently use basic persuasive devices?
• Does my child refer back to and connect ideas and arguments from previous sections of the text?

Step 3: Allow time for review

Before moving to the final step of the evaluation process, allow your child some time to take in the feedback you have just provided them.

Step 4: Spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and vocabulary

Lastly, parents can highlight mistakes in spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and vocabulary.

Remember that Year 3 writers are beginners! Focus feedback on repeated mistakes and avoid excessively pointing out one-off mistakes.

Value your child’s opinion

Confidence in one’s opinion is important for persuasive writing success. That’s why positive reinforcement is essential for developing students’ confidence in their opinion.

The more confident a student is in their opinion, the more likely they are to put forward interesting and engaging arguments without the fear of being wrong.

Remember these points when communicating feedback:

• Complement areas where your child has done well in their writing
• Show your child the specific area in their writing that could be improved
• Instead of broad feedback, focus on small and actionable tips

Our practical persuasive writing tips

The easier students make it for readers – and in the case of NAPLAN – markers, to understand their ideas, the higher their marks will be. With all of the different moving parts in a persuasive writing exam, students can forget what to focus on.

3 must-know persuasive writing goals

Students and parents should work towards these three major goals to grow their persuasive writing ability

Tip 1: Have structured writing

Separate writing into paragraphed sections consisting of an introduction, body, and conclusion. While the introduction and conclusion should be one paragraph each, the body should have multiple paragraphs.

Remember, the NAPLAN persuasive writing marking criteria gives 0-3 points for effective paragraphing and 0-4 points for text structure, so this is an easy section to grab some extra marks!

Tip 2: Get familiar with persuasive devices

Basic persuasive devices can enhance your child’s writing. Year 3 students can begin to think about devices such as high modality language, emotive language, and analogies. Find the definitions of these techniques in our free English Literary Techniques Toolkit.

The use of persuasive devices also accounts for 0-4 points, so it’s worth spending some time to learn a few basic techniques.

Tip 3: Always have evidence

All arguments need evidence! This is where the writer-reader relationship becomes important for students to think about. Students should ask themselves why a reader would trust the arguments they make. This will lead to thinking about how students can write in a way that readers will trust.

At the Year 3 level, students can draw evidence from a variety of informal sources. Students should fall back on their own personal experiences and anecdotes for sources of evidence.

The next step?

Ready to get your child practising writing a persuasive for the Year 3 NAPLAN writing exam, but unsure of where to start? Use our free NAPLAN Persuasive Writing Guide for a step-by-step on planning, writing, and marking your child’s persuasive writing.

If you’re after more Primary School and NAPLAN resources and advice, you should check out our other articles. We are always adding new articles to support our community of students and parents:

• How To Write a Band 6 Creative For Year 3 NAPLAN | Narrative Writing Tips
• 7 Common Language Convention Mistakes Students Make In Year 3 NAPLAN
• 5 Common Numeracy Mistakes Students Make in the Year 3 NAPLAN
• Year 3 Multiplication Practice Questions | 10 Problems to Test Your Child
• What you need to know about NAPLAN for your child
• 5 Tips To Prepare Your Year 4 Child For The Selective School Exam

And we have these download resources to support parents and students:

• Year 3 Vocabulary worksheets
• Year 4 Vocabulary worksheets
• Year 3 NAPLAN Narrative writing Study Pack – Write Band 6 Narratives
• Year 3 NAPLAN Persuasive Writing – Help your child improve their Persuasive Writing