To earn their readers’ confidence, writers of essays finding common ground must come across as impartial. To achieve this, writers should give roughly equal attention to both positions and avoid taking a position on the issue. In addition, they should carefully assess the words they use to describe the positions, their proponents, or the actions of the proponents. Consider the following sentence from paragraph 5 of Betsy Samson’s essay (pp. 183–87):
More importantly, as Chua’s anecdote about her daughter Lulu’s effort to learn to play a difficult piano piece demonstrates, children raised the Chinese way succeed because their parents force them to drill until they achieve mastery. (par. 5)
Except perhaps for “force,” Samson has carefully chosen words with neutral connotations; were the highlighted words in Samson’s sentence to be replaced by words that have a more negative connotation, the tone would become more critical of Chua:
More importantly, as Chua’s anecdote about her daughter Lulu’s painful struggle to learn to play a demanding piano piece demonstrates, children raised the Chinese way succeed because their parents force them to drill until they achieve mastery. (par. 5)
As you write (and revise) your common ground essay, consider the connotation of the words you use to describe the positions and the proponents of those positions, and make sure to choose neutral words.