TA - How do I know what to keep in my paper?

I wrote my first paper in this Persuasive Writing class.

I actually finished it.

We then had a peer review session in class, and my peer didn't have that much bad stuff to say about it at all. So I certainly shouldn't feel bad in any way. But I kinda do.

There was a lot of research that I just couldn't include in my paper. What was I to do? We were supposed to write a 1,000 word paper, and while that seemed daunting at the outset I quickly realized that 1,000 words come a bit sooner than you'd expect. I can't stop wondering if I should have dropped a paragraph that didn't completely mold with my enthymeme (argument), and replaced it with a paragraph that had more information and less emotion.

My enthymeme is as follows: Comprehensive sex education improves teenage sexual health because comprehensive sex education teaches information about contraceptives and more accurate information regarding STDs. The paragraph in question (too long to include here) was about the illegality of some decisions made by the government in relation to their funding toward abstinence-only programs. However, that topic doesn't exactly fit in with my enthymeme. I included it, though, because it would arouse emotion in my audience of conservative parents - and I wanted that emotion.

My other paragraph would have dealt with the statistics of European teenagers and their response to a very liberal sexual education policy. While pretty dang interesting in itself (...uh-huh...), it would not have made my audience feel the indignation that my current paragraph should. Stuck in the decision of whether to keep the paragraph or not, I followed the path-of-least-resistance method and used the 'illegality' paragraph that I had already written.

Now I can only hope that my decision will actually arouse emotion. *ahem* That is, an emotion other than the frustration my professor might feel about an irrelevant paragraph.