TEDNA

Here. An excerpt:

With this, our first-ever Student Editorial Contest, we’re asking you to channel that enthusiasm into something a little more formal: short, evidence-based persuasive essays like the editorials The New York Times publishes every day.
The challenge is pretty straightforward. Choose a topic you care about, gather evidence from both New York Times and non-New York Times sources, and write a concise editorial (450 words or fewer) to convince readers of your point of view.

Because editorial writing at newspapers is a collaborative process, you can write your entry as a team effort, or by yourself. When you’re done, post it in the comments section below by March 17, 2014.

With our contest partner, the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, we will then use this rubric to select winners to publish on The Learning Network.

As teachers know, the persuasive essay has long been a staple of high school education, but the Common Core standards seem to have put evidence-based argumentative writing on everybody’s agenda. You couldn’t ask for a more real-world example of the genre than the classic newspaper editorial — and The Times publishes, on average, four of them a day.

To help with this challenge, Andrew Rosenthal, The Times’s editorial page editor, made the video above, in which he details seven pointers. We have also culled 200 prompts for argumentative writing from our Student Opinion feature to help inspire you, though, of course, you are not limited to those topics. Finally, we’ll publish a lesson plan on editorial writing later this week.

So what issue do you care about? Gun violence?School lunch?Reality TV? You decide. Then use the facts to convince us that you’re right.

Let’s spread the word, and hopefully we can see a native student or group win this contest!