A new member said he had to give an 8 minute persuasive argument for his public speaking class. His topic was evolution vs. creative design. A number of posters listed sites he could use, and I made some suggestions.
Unfortunately, the CFI website had a glitch and lost posts and everything else for the last three days or so. I’ll try to reconstruct my suggestions for him, and I hope he signs up again.
A major problem people have is using too many words, and this dillutes their arguments. Write your paper as if you were going to give a half hour talk (3,000 - 3,500 words), then go through and see what words and phrases you can eliminate without hurting the meaning. Try to be as succinct as possible, and boil it down to about a thousand words. That should be about 8 minutes and carry a lot of punch.
To you other posters who had links or suggestions, re-enter them here.
Occam