A popular assignment built around Hatchet asks students to take a position on one of Brian's key decisions, such as whether he should have tried harder to signal the search plane earlier, or whether staying near the crash site was the right call. This kind of prompt is a natural fit for teaching persuasive writing, since it requires students to form and defend a clear opinion using evidence from the text. The challenge for grading is that persuasive writing about a character's choices can easily slide into unsupported opinion if a rubric does not explicitly require textual grounding for every claim. A confident, well organized essay can still be disconnected from what the book actually shows.

The most important rubric distinction for this assignment type is separating having an opinion from supporting an opinion with evidence, since these are functionally two different skills even though they often get conflated in student writing. A student arguing that Brian should have built a signal fire sooner needs to demonstrate, using specific details from the text, what Brian actually knew at each point in the story and why an earlier fire was realistically possible given his resources. Essays that argue purely from hindsight, assuming Brian should have known things he had no way of knowing yet, are demonstrating a common reasoning flaw worth flagging directly.

It also helps to require students to address a counterargument, since Hatchet's plot offers clear material for this: Brian tried several approaches before ultimately succeeding, and acknowledging why his earlier attempts failed produces a more sophisticated and honest persuasive essay. A rubric row specifically rewarding counterargument acknowledgment pushes students away from the simplistic "he should have just done X" style of argument. It moves them toward a more nuanced understanding of the constraints Brian was actually working within throughout the novel.

Common Reasoning Errors to Watch For

Persuasive essays about Brian's decisions frequently suffer from hindsight bias, where students judge his choices using information the reader has but Brian did not have in the moment. An essay claiming Brian was foolish not to search for the survival pack immediately, for example, ignores the fact that he did not know about the pack's existence until much later in the story. Catching this kind of reasoning error requires a teacher to actually track the novel's timeline alongside the student's argument, which takes more careful reading than grading a straightforward summary essay. Flagging this specific error type consistently across a class set often reveals it as a widespread pattern rather than an isolated mistake.

• Watch for arguments that rely on information Brian did not actually have access to at that point in the story
• Require students to acknowledge at least one reasonable justification for the choice they are arguing against
• Check that claims about what Brian "should have done" are grounded in his actual skills and resources at the time
• Flag essays that judge Brian by adult standards rather than considering his age and inexperience
• Reward essays that consider the emotional and psychological state Brian was in when making each decision

Balancing Rigor With Room for Genuine Debate

One risk in grading persuasive essays about a specific character decision is inadvertently signaling to students that only one correct position exists, which undermines the purpose of a persuasive writing assignment. A rubric focused on the quality of argumentation, rather than which side a student takes, avoids this trap and keeps the assignment genuinely open ended. Two students can argue opposite positions about whether Brian should have tried to build a raft earlier and both receive full marks, as long as each supports their position with specific, accurately contextualized evidence. Making this explicit to students before they begin writing tends to reduce anxiety about guessing the right answer.

That said, rigor still matters, and a rubric should not reward a confidently stated but poorly supported argument simply because it takes an interesting position. The line between a genuinely defensible unconventional argument and a simply incorrect one usually comes down to whether the student can accurately represent what happens in the text while still building their case. An essay arguing Brian's caution actually slowed his rescue down can be a legitimate position if supported with accurate textual detail, but becomes indefensible if it misrepresents the sequence of events to make the argument easier to construct.

Feedback Around Argument Strength, Not Just Grammar

Grading persuasive writing pulls a teacher's attention in two directions at once, evaluating the mechanical quality of the writing and the logical strength of the argument, and it helps to keep these somewhat separate in feedback even when they are combined in the final grade. A student can write grammatically clean sentences while building a weak argument, and conversely a student with a genuinely strong argument might need real support with sentence construction. Feedback that conflates these two dimensions, marking down an overall grade without specifying whether the issue is the argument or the prose, leaves students unclear about what to actually work on next.

A practical way to keep these separate is using distinct rubric rows for argument quality and writing mechanics, then providing at least one comment tied to each row rather than a single general comment. This takes slightly more time per essay than a single holistic comment, but it produces feedback students can actually act on, since they know whether their next step should be strengthening evidence or tightening sentence structure. Over a semester of persuasive writing assignments, this kind of separated feedback tends to produce more targeted improvement than combined feedback that leaves students guessing at the primary issue.