Rhetorical Devices in Argumentative writing

We teach teenagers to factorise quadratics, to name the kings of England, to dissect a frog. We do not, as a rule, teach them to feed themselves. There is something quietly absurd about a system that prepares us for the exam hall but not for the one room we will stand in every single day of our adult lives: the kitchen.

Learning to cook is not a hobby. It is independence. The teenager who can turn rice, eggs and a few vegetables into a meal is cheaper to feed, healthier, and harder to exploit by an industry that profits from our helplessness. A microwave meal is convenience sold back to you at four times the price of the ingredients it replaced.

So teach us. Not gourmet showpieces — just the handful of real, repeatable meals that turn a hungry, dependent teenager into a capable adult. It is the most practical lesson school could ever give.

I want to begin with a number, and then I want to forget it. Two thousand, four hundred pounds. That is what closing this library would save the council each week — the cost, roughly, of a single bus shelter. Hold that number for a moment, because the council certainly will.

Now forget it. Because a library is not a line on a budget; it is the one warm, free, welcoming room a town has left. It is where a child who owns no books finds a thousand. It is where a jobseeker prints a CV, where a pensioner escapes an empty afternoon, where a stranger becomes a regular.

Some will say we cannot afford to keep it open. I say we cannot afford the kind of town that closes it. A community that shuts its library to save the price of a bus shelter has not balanced its books. It has quietly decided what it no longer wishes to be.

Ask any teenager to be alert at half past eight in the morning and you are asking the biologically impossible. We treat this as a discipline problem — a failure of willpower, of early nights, of character. It is nothing of the kind. It is a failure of timing, and the timing is entirely our own to fix.

The science is not in dispute. During adolescence the body clock shifts later by two hours or more, so the teenage brain is not built to fall asleep early or wake early. Forcing a sixteen-year-old to learn calculus at eight in the morning is, in neurological terms, like asking an adult to sit an exam at four. We would never design a workplace this way. Yet we design every school this way, and then we blame the children for yawning.

Consider what that early start actually costs. It costs concentration, so lessons must be re-taught. It costs mood, so classrooms grow short-tempered. It costs safety, because drowsy teenagers drive, and drowsy teenagers are dangerous. We are not saving time by starting early; we are spending it — on lower marks, on poorer health, on accidents we then call tragedies. A late start is not indulgence. It is efficiency we have refused to claim.

Now, I can hear the objection, because it is a reasonable one. Parents work. The school run is woven into the morning, and a later start unpicks it. Buses are timetabled, sports fixtures are fixed, and the whole creaking machine of the day is built around that eight-thirty bell. To move it is genuinely inconvenient.

But notice what that objection actually says. It says we should keep harming teenagers' learning, health and safety because the adult timetable is hard to change. Put like that, it does not hold. We have rebuilt the working day around far smaller discoveries than this one; offices flex, deliveries reschedule, transport adapts — when we decide they must. Inconvenience is not a reason to do the wrong thing. It is the price of doing the right one.

So let us be honest about the choice in front of us. We can keep a timetable that suits the clock on the wall, or we can build one that suits the clock inside the child. We can carry on calling tired teenagers lazy, or we can admit that we have been waking them at the wrong hour and quietly paying for it for years.

Move the bell. Not because it is easy, but because the evidence, the health and the plain decency of it all point in one direction. We have built the school day around the convenience of adults for long enough. It is time we built it around the biology of the young.

Take out your phone. Go on — hold it in your hand. Feel the weight of it. Now ask yourself one honest question: in the last hour, did you use it, or did it use you?

I am not here to lecture you. I am holding the same glowing rectangle, with the same nine hundred notifications, the same itch to check it the second it buzzes. I am as caught as you are. That is exactly why I want to talk about it — not from above, but from inside the trap with you.

Here is what I have noticed. The phone does not ask for an hour. It asks for a minute, and takes the evening. It does not interrupt the conversation; it sits on the table and quietly hollows it out. We are more connected than any humans who have ever lived, and somehow lonelier — talking constantly, listening rarely, present nowhere. We scroll through other people's highlights and call it keeping in touch.

Now, you might say: my phone is how I keep my friends, organise my life, learn, laugh, belong. And you are right. I am not asking you to throw it in the sea. The phone is a tool, and a brilliant one. But a tool you cannot put down is not a tool any more. It is a leash. And the test of whether you own a thing, or it owns you, is simple: can you set it down for one evening?

So that is all I am asking. Not a detox. Not a vow. One evening a week — phone in a drawer, in another room, off. One evening to find out who you are when nobody can reach you. One evening to discover that the world does not end, the friendships do not collapse, and the silence, after the first restless hour, turns out to be full of things you had stopped hearing.

Try it once. Just once. Put it in the drawer, walk away, and meet the version of yourself that has been waiting, patiently, on the other side of the screen.

There is a fashionable idea, kind in its intentions, that we should spare children the sting of losing — that competition is cruel, that the scoreboard wounds, that the gentlest classroom is the one where nobody comes last. It is a comfortable idea. It is also, I will argue, a quiet betrayal of the very children it claims to protect, which is why competitive sport should not merely be offered in our schools, but required.

Begin with the obvious, because the obvious is being forgotten. A generation is growing up less active, more sedentary and more anxious than any before it. Compulsory competitive sport is the simplest, cheapest public-health intervention available to us: it moves bodies that would otherwise sit still, and it does so not for an abstract future but for the visible, immediate good of a child who runs, breathes, sleeps and thinks better for it. We do not make mathematics optional because some find it hard. We should not make physical health optional because some find it uncomfortable.

But the deeper case is not about the body at all. It is about what competition teaches that nothing else in school can. In a match, a child meets, in a safe and bounded form, the two great facts of an adult life: that effort does not guarantee success, and that failure is survivable. The pupil who loses on Saturday, shakes hands, and turns up to train on Monday has learned a lesson no worksheet contains — that defeat is not the end of you, but information for your next attempt. Strip competition out of childhood and you do not abolish failure; you merely postpone a child's first meeting with it to an age, and a context, where it will hurt far more.

I must take seriously the strongest objection, because it is the one I once believed myself. Competition, the argument runs, humiliates the weak, crowns the strong, and teaches the already-confident that they are superior and the already-anxious that they are not enough. Forced competition, on this view, does not build resilience; it manufactures shame. And where sport is badly run — where winning is worshipped and the slowest child is left, last and laughed at, on the touchline — that objection is not merely valid. It is an indictment.

But notice that this is an argument against bad competition, not against competition. The remedy for a race that humiliates is not to ban racing; it is to run it well — to widen what counts as winning, to celebrate the improved as loudly as the fastest, to make the handshake matter as much as the result. A school that makes sport compulsory takes on precisely this responsibility: not to expose children to cruelty, but to teach them, under supervision, the hardest and most useful skill there is — how to try, how to lose, and how to begin again.

So let us stop confusing kindness with avoidance. The truly kind thing is not to hide the scoreboard from children; it is to stand beside them while they learn to read it. Make it compulsory — not to crown winners, but to raise people who can lose a match on Saturday and, undefeated where it matters, walk back out on Monday.

My task was an argumentative newspaper piece for a general adult readership — many of them parents and taxpayers — so my controlling decision was to lead with logos and treat my rhetorical devices as servants of the evidence rather than substitutes for it. I wanted the piece to feel reasoned first and rousing second, because an adult audience distrusts a teenager who only emotes.

My most deliberate early choice was the analogy 'like asking an adult to sit an exam at four'. I chose it because the scientific point (a two-hour shift in the adolescent body clock) is abstract and easily dismissed, and an analogy imports the reader's own settled judgement — every adult knows they would fail an exam at 4 a.m. — onto my contested case. The persuasive work is done by the reader, not by me, which is why I placed it immediately after the factual claim rather than instead of it.

To make the cost of early starts feel total, I built a tricolon with anaphora: 'It costs concentration… It costs mood… It costs safety.' I arranged the three in ascending order so the climax falls on 'safety' — the most alarming, and the one most likely to move a cautious parent. I kept the repeated opening short ('It costs') so the variation carries the meaning, and I stopped at three because a fourth clause would have tipped a controlled rhythm into a rant.

My single most calculated move was the counterargument. I voiced the parents' real objection and conceded it generously ('it is a reasonable one'), because pre-empting resistance earns credibility with the very readers I most needed to win. I then re-framed it with an antithesis ('Inconvenience is not a reason to do the wrong thing. It is the price of doing the right one'), using the balance of the syntax to make my answer feel like the logical one.

I closed on antithesis and a short call to action ('Move the bell') because a designed peroration outscores a piece that merely stops. If I were to revise, I would cut the word 'tragedies', which slightly over-reaches toward pathos and risks the 'ranting' tone I was trying to avoid; the safety point is strong enough to land without it.