Persuade Me

PURPOSE: To persuade.

SPECIFIC PURPOSE: The purpose of my speech is to alert the audience to the problems associated with low reading abilities and persuade them to read to young children.

INTRODUCTION

ATTENTION GETTER: Unemployment! Prison! Suicide! Welfare! Are these the things we want for the children in our lives? Is this where we want the country to go? Do we want this kind of future for our children?

AUDIENCE ANALYSIS: Answer: Of course we don't! Every one of us in this room has been a child and has seen what struggling in school has done to our classmates or to ourselves. Each of us who has children watch sometimes helplessly as our children or children in our lives struggle to read then struggle to catch up as a result of poor reading skills.

THESIS STATEMENT: The inability to read and absorb information is a nationwide problem that directly effects suicide rates, unemployment rates, and crime rates and on which each individual can have a positive impact by implementing two simple solutions, read to children from an early age and support education policy reform to enable teachers to better help those students in need of extra help.

BODY

PATTERN: Monroe's Motivated Sequence

I. Inadequate ability to read contributes to the suicide rates among adolescents and adults.

A. Of the suicides that occurred in the United States in 1998, 45% were high school dropouts or at achievement levels significantly below that of their peers; of that number, 80% suffered from below average reading levels throughout their academic careers.

(Nicholas Lemann.PhD. Ready, Read! The Atlantic Monthly. Boston: Nov 1998. ProQuest 6/28/04)

1. Low reading levels contribute to low self esteem which leads to clinical depression over time and contributes significantly to feelings of worthlessness which increase incidence of suicide by 50%.

(Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. 1998.)

B. Low reading levels increase the chance of dropout prior to completion of high school.

1. 36% of 9th graders and 46% of 10th graders were forced to repeat in 2003 in the New York School system due to the inability to read well enough to absorb information in textbooks.

(Lewin, Tamar. New York Times.B-11 4/14/04 from ProQuest 6/28/04)

2. Researchers have found that repeating a grade doesn't work, in fact, it magnifies the negative effects of the low reading levels.

(Mathews, Washington Post A-09,3/23/04, Lexis Nexis 6/28/04)

(1) Nearly 60% of 6th graders retained in that year showed no improvement over a two year period.

(2) The dropout rate for this group of 6th graders was 85% of those retained.

(3) Locally, of WOCCISD students, only 76.4% passed the TAAS Reading tests in 2002 and only 14.2% of the students from this district scored above the minimum criterion on the SAT and ACT tests with an average dropout rate of 2.3% which is equal to approximately 4 students per year from the total of 12th graders in the district.

(http://tx.rand.org/cgi-bin/annual_edtx.cgi. Texas Statistics 6/28/04)

(a) The dropout rate for WOCCISD that encompasses total enrollment is equal to a staggering 77 students per year.

3. People with low reading scores, below 6th grade level, have a 23% higher probability of becoming unemployed and when unemployed, an average of 3.4 additional months of unemployment.

(Avshalom Caspi, et al. American Sociological Review. June 1998 ProQuest 6/28/04)

4. Americans barely reach the international literacy average set by advanced democracies, according to a report issued by the Educational Testing Service after looking at the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS).

(http://www.nrrf.org/essay_peterson_1102.htm. 6/29/04)

II. Possibly the easiest and best solution for low reading levels in children is to begin reading to them at an early age, as early as birth; continue throughout their formative years, through age 10; and encourage reading for pleasure in the preteen and teenage years, through age 18.

(Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children 1998)

A. It is acceptable to read aloud almost anything