Arguing in Print: Six Opinion Pieces and What They Teach

Every student newspaper has an opinion page, and every opinion page has a temperature. At The Paper, the student newspaper of Dana Hills High School, the temperature ran warm. Between 2019 and 2021 the staff argued about capital punishment, Advanced Placement classes, webcams on Zoom, a presidential impeachment and whether pineapple belongs on pizza. Some of those pieces hold up as arguments. Some hold up mainly as a record of what a teenager in South Orange County was thinking about that week. Both kinds are worth reading.

This essay, written for the archive in 2026, looks at six of them. It is not a grade sheet. The writers were high school students on deadline, and nobody is being marked down here. The point is that an opinion piece has parts, and these six show the parts unusually clearly, partly because the students sometimes got them right by instinct and sometimes left a seam showing.

Start with the ground, not the verdict

APs: Not Worthwhile for Everyone, from October 2019, is the most carefully built argument in the archive. It opens with a feeling the reader already has (dread, sleepless nights) and then spends two paragraphs granting what is true about AP courses: they can earn college credit, and colleges read them as a sign of readiness. Only then does it turn. The claim, when it arrives, is narrower than the headline. The writer does not say AP classes are bad. The argument is that the habit of prescribing them to every student is bad, and it splits the audience in three: students aiming at schools with single-digit admission rates, students aiming at moderately selective colleges, and students headed for community college or a vocational program.

That split is the move worth copying. A thesis that says “it depends, and here is on what” is harder to write than a plain yes or no, and much harder to knock down. The piece also brings numbers, citing Pew Research Center figures on how many colleges admit fewer than 10 percent of applicants. Whether or not a reader checks them, their presence says the writer did. If you want to see how a first paragraph sets up that kind of claim, AllEssay's guide on how to write an essay introduction compares openings that earn the reader's attention with openings that lose it in the first line.

Know which objection you are answering

Is the Death Penalty Just? (October 2019) takes a firm position and says so. It opens with the legal map, noting how many states allowed capital punishment at the time, then names the main objection, that the penalty violates the right to life, before replying to it. That is the classic order: state the opposing view in a form its own supporters would recognize, then answer it.

Where the piece wanders is in the middle, when it leaves capital punishment to argue about abortion and a presidential candidate's positions. Whatever a reader makes of that comparison, it changes the subject, and a changed subject is the easiest thing for an opponent to point at. The cost argument that follows, built on figures for the yearly expense of keeping a person in prison, returns to the actual question. An editor's pencil would probably have written: cut the detour, go straight to the cost.

The general lesson is simple to state and hard to follow. Every paragraph in an opinion piece should push the same claim. One way to test a draft is to read each topic sentence on its own, in order, and ask of each one whether it serves the thesis or opens a second fight. Another is to write the thesis on a card before drafting and check that a reasonable person could disagree with it. The death penalty piece passes that first test easily. Its trouble came later, in the paragraphs.

Two writers, one page

In November 2019 the paper ran Trump Impeachment: Two Opinions, a pro and a con by two student writers on the same page. It is the oldest format in newspaper opinion and one of the most useful for a student staff, because each writer knows a reply is sitting right next to them. The pro side builds its case by accumulation: one controversy after another had worn down public patience, and the Ukraine call was the last straw. The con side argues from process, calling the inquiry partisan and quoting the Mueller report's finding that the investigation did not establish a conspiracy with the Russian government.

Read together, the two halves show something a single op-ed hides. Each writer chose a different kind of evidence. One leaned on a pattern, the other on a document. Neither directly answered the other's best point. For a student practicing argument, that gap is the exercise to borrow: write your side, read the strongest version of the other side, and add one paragraph that meets it head on.

The case for a small question

Not every opinion needs a national stage. Should students be required to have their cameras on during class?, from January 2021, takes a question that came up in distance-learning classrooms and treats it with care. The writer agrees that cameras are reasonable during tests and important announcements, then argues that requiring them all day can be a distraction in itself: it shows classmates the inside of a student's home, and there is no way to tell who has “pinned” your video. The conclusion is moderate: students should not be required to keep cameras on, and teachers should offer other ways to check participation.

The piece works because it is specific. Detail, like the pin feature and the bedroom turned classroom, is what makes a small question worth reading. A reader can reject the conclusion and still come away knowing what remote school felt like that winter.

Satire is an argument too

In Defense of Pineapple on Pizza (March 2020) is a parody of an op-ed, and a sharp one. It opens by mocking the either-or habits of political talk, then waves off the very idea of false dichotomies and cheerfully commits several fallacies of its own: the school-lunch logic that turns pizza into a vegetable and then a fruit, an invented pizza tree blossoming in Naples, a confident appeal to sweet-and-sour sauce. The joke only lands because the writer knows exactly what a real argument looks like and bends each part of it on purpose.

That makes it a good teaching text. Hand a class the pineapple piece, ask them to name each trick, and they will finish with a list of the weak moves to keep out of their own serious writing.

Provocation with a payoff

The last of the six, Students Should Analyze Song Lyrics Instead of Shakespeare from March 2021, starts loud. It says Taylor Swift's songs could take the place of the classics and points to her nods to Romeo and Juliet, The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby. Then, near the end, it says “all jokes aside” and lands somewhere far more defensible: the classics can stay, but a curriculum that pairs old texts with new ones would get more students interested in learning.

The headline overstates the claim, and the closing paragraph quietly takes some of it back. That is a common pattern in student writing and in plenty of professional columns. The fix is not to tone down the headline. It is to decide in advance which claim you actually mean and write the whole piece toward it. A provocative first line is fine as long as the last line backs it.

What carries over

Put the six side by side and a short list comes out of them. Grant the other side its best point before you answer it. Keep every paragraph on the same claim. Give each paragraph one detail that only someone who looked closely would know. Decide whether you are delivering a verdict or a “depends on,” and say which. And if the piece is satire, know the serious form well enough to bend it.

None of that is new advice, but it reads differently when the examples come from a campus newspaper instead of a textbook. These writers worked on deadline, under an editor, for readers who sat next to them in class. Most students reach the same point later, with a college essay or an argument paper they want someone else to read before it goes out. For that kind of draft-by-draft feedback, a one-on-one essay tutor who works on your pages rather than writing them plays the part a good student editor played for this staff.

The rest of the opinion page is still here, at the addresses where it was first published. The Opinion section holds the arguments this essay skipped, from vaping rules on campus to the State of the Union.