Read both excerpts and answer the questions

1. 
   Read both excerpts and answer the questions.
   

What’s the difference between a research paper and opinion piece?

In an opinion paper, you will focus on a topic about which you have personal thoughts, beliefs, or feelings.  Your goal is to persuade your reader that your position on this topic is the best one. You won’t accomplish that goal with a rant or diatribe. Instead, you will need to support your claim with facts, statistics, real-life examples or published research studies. So, despite its name, an opinion paper will require some research.

The most common research paper assignment (particularly in undergraduate courses) is a lot like a literature review. You will conduct a thorough search for scholarly sources about your chosen topic, then carefully read and summarize them. But beyond simply describing the books and articles that you read, your goal is to participate in the scholarly “conversation” surrounding your topic. You can do that by:

• 
  Organizing your paper by themes or trends that you discovered in the literature
  
• 
  Identifying and explaining controversies surrounding your topic
  
• 
  Pointing out strengths and weaknesses in the studies that you read
  
• 
  Identifying aspects of the topic that need further research
  

Sometimes (more commonly in graduate courses), you will design your own study and write about it. While this kind of research paper includes a literature review section, it will also require you to describe your study’s methodology, data analysis and results.

What makes a piece informative as opposed to persuasive?

An informative speech aims to inform the audience about a specific topic. A persuasive speech aims to persuade the audience to perform a certain action or convince the audience to adopt the belief or opinion of the speaker. Many speeches will combine features of informative and persuasive speeches.

2. 
   Answer the following questions about the excerpts you just read. 
   

 3.   Work  with  a  partner.  Check  ( /)  whether the  topics  below  are  for  an  expository  or  a persuasive  essay/research  paper.

	Expository	Persuasive
a.  How Barack Obama became President  of the  United  States		✔
b.The  effects  of coffee  on the body		✔
c.Technology’s  negative  effects  on social  skills	✅
d.  Why  smartphones  will  replace computers  in ten  years	✅
e.  Living  in  the tropics  on  ten  dollars a  day		✔
f.  How to  survive  a Canadian winter		✔
g.  Why  public  schools  need  more funding		✔