Opinions and Reasons

In order for your child to effectively express their opinion in their writing, they need to understand how opinions can come across effectively. Opinions that stand alone without any reasoning - especially if they are particularly controversial - will not be received very well. Opinions that are accompanied by reasons are much more effective in writing! The two together are the most effective way for your readers to understand why you have a certain opinion or belief, and even be persuaded to agree with you. Without reason, it’s much harder to convince your readers of your opinion.

Why is it important to pair opinions with reasons?

Writing an opinion piece is not easy. Because opinions vary widely from person to person, opinions are not always agreed with. Additionally, if opinions are not presented in the most convincing way, it’s much easier for readers to misunderstand, disagree with, or dismiss the opinion being presented. In order to avoid these issues, providing reasons for why you believe a specific view is very important. Without reasons accompanying your opinions, it’s much harder to convince your readers to believe you!

How to support your opinion with reasons

Once your child has decided on an opinion they'd like to write about, the next step is coming up with reasons to support it. It can sometimes be tricky to come up with support for why you believe something, so we came up with a list of questions your child can ask themselves when they're finding it tricky to come up with reasons to support their opinion:

1. Why do you believe/feel/think this way?
2. Are there facts you can provide that help support your opinion?
3. Are there opinions you have about a related topic that would help support this opinion?
4. What details can you provide your reader with so they can understand your opinion better? What will make your opinion more convincing?
5. How does your opinion make you feel? Express this.

Example of an opinion and reasons to support that opinion

To make it more clear what an opinion looks like when it has reasons to support it, we’ve come up with an example of an opinion about Night Zookeeper!

Opinion: The best game on Night Zookeeper is Underwater Word Hunt.

Reasons: Underwater Word Hunt is the best game in Night Zookeeper because your character gets to ride in a submarine underwater, even if they aren’t a marine animal, which is so cool! Also, you get five lives, which is enough to make mistakes a few times. I’m also not very good at spelling, and this game has helped me learn how to correctly spell so many words, which is why it’s the best!

Even if our readers don’t end up agreeing with us that Underwater Word Hunt is the best game in Night Zookeeper, we did our best to convince them why we believe this. We provided several different reasons as to why we thought this way, which makes the opinion much stronger than it would have been without any reasons!

Activity & resource

Hopefully, by now, your child understands why it’s important to have reasons for their opinions in their writing and how to come up with reasons for their opinions. Now is the perfect time for your child to practice using reasons to back up an opinion with this activity!