Well shit. This is right up my alley.
Firstly, the distinction between research papers and opinion pieces is a false dichotomy perpetuated by English teachers. Research papers are inherently persuasive—you’re trying to push your thesis and you support it with argumentation the same as you would do in an opinion piece.
The only difference is that in an opinion piece you’re allowed the freedom to relax and show more ‘style’ than in a research paper.
Secondly, here’s what worked for me: I took a few creative writing classes (2.5ish, by my count, spread across hs and college) and was the president of our school’s creative writing club. The club itself was just a hang-out plus writing prompt every Friday morning, but it was consistent practice. But far and away the biggest thing for my personal essaying abilities was blogging/journaling online.
In online journal writing, you have complete freedom of form that allows you to structure things in vastly different ways than you would an essay for a teacher. The problem is that no one really teaches you this because they’re busy pushing their 5-paragraph-essay uncut dope. Start by telling the story of your day for an unnamed reader on a daily basis, but the catch is to make it interesting to read. Then later move on to setting yourself writing prompts. Some ones I did in the past: 1) The family ritual I had to go through to become a man 2) Why I fell in love with that one girl and 3) I once wrote 7,000 words on the experience of coming back from a summer program and readjusting to life.
As for structure, journalism has just as much of a difficulty as high school essay writing. Instead of the 5 paragraph uncut dope, they’re pushing a raw kilo of “start with the most important information and work your way down.” Read any newspaper article and they do this—it’s fucking infuriating because it’s atrocious writing but it makes it so easy to read.
Instead, try this: when writing an article, don’t consider putting the narrative in chronological order. Instead, recognize what the real through-line of the characters and the whole “point” of the story is, and organize your narrative around that. Stanislavski came up with it, but Nabokov brought it to perfection: He used to write out his stories on notecards and keep them in a deck in his pocket so he could always be rearranging them into an order that makes narrative sense even if it’s not chronological.
Just beware of shifting time, because this can be confusing for the reader.
Then direct any further questions to me :D
