“Planning a Persuasive Paper: A Step-by-Step Guide”

The planning part is just the prewriting; you should have learned a process for that in ENGL 1301 and ENGL 1302, but some of my students did not (I have some colleagues who just don’t bother to teach it, even though Texas mandates it), so most of the material in Unit 4 is about that. We teach five steps in planning a paper, and the project asks you to do all five steps with a pen in your hand and capture evidence that you did each step intentionally and consciously. So you will 
show how you came up with a topic (include some mind mapping) 
show how your came up with ideas to include in a paper about that topic (include more mind mapping or listing, and prepare an annotated bibliography to show what research you collected)
show how you thought about how to appeal to an audience for a paper like this one (fill out an Audience and Use Profile form describing the kind of person who would read your paper by choice, without having to be forced to read it)
show how you arrived at a thesis, or main point (with a short paragraph describing your thinking)
show how you will organize it (by completing an outline that shows the sequence of subtopics and where you will include your research).
Then you draft the paper from that planning, and revise it to create the final version, showing your revising on the draft. 
You include all the prewriting and the annotated bibliography and revisions of your rough draft in the portal for the project.
Submit the final copy of the paper with a list of Works Cited in the portal for the paper.