Unit II Article Review

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3From Writing Summaries and Paraphrases to Writing Yourself into Academic Conversations

Reading like a writer and writing like a reader help you understand how texts work rhetorically. When you start to use those texts to build your own arguments, there are certain strategies for working with the words and ideas of others that you will have to learn. Often you can quote the words of an author directly; but just as often you will restate (paraphrase) and condense (summarize) the arguments of others to educate your reader about the issues in a particular academic conversation. Indeed, many academic essays begin with a literature review — a roundup that summarizes important arguments and perspectives in such a conversation — as a prelude to the writer setting forth his or her own arguments on an issue. In this chapter, we will present methods of paraphrase and summary. Learning to paraphrase and summarize helps you understand texts and convey that understanding to other participants in the conversation.

SUMMARIES, PARAPHRASES, AND QUOTATIONS

In contrast to quotations, which involve using another writer’s exact words, paraphrases and summaries are both restatements of another writer’s ideas in your own words, but they differ in length and scope:

· A paraphrase is frequently about the same length as the original passage.

· A summary generally condenses a significantly longer text, conveying the argument not only of a few sentences but also of entire paragraphs, essays, or books.

In your own writing, you might paraphrase a few sentences or even a few paragraphs, but you certainly would not paraphrase a whole essay (much less a whole book). In constructing your arguments, however, you will often have to summarize the main points of the lengthy texts with which you are in conversation.

Both paraphrasing and summarizing are means to inquiry. That is, the act of recasting someone else’s words or ideas into your own language, to suit your argument and reach your readers, forces you to think critically: What does this passage really mean? What is most important about it for my argument? How can I best present it to my readers? It requires making choices, not least of which is determining the best way to present the information — through paraphrase, summary, or direct quotation. In general, the following rules apply:

· Paraphrase when all the information in the passage is important, but the language is not key to your discussion, or if it may be difficult for your readers to understand.

· Summarize when you need to present only the key ideas of a passage (or an essay or a book) to advance your argument.

· Quote when the passage is so effective — so clear, so concise, so authoritative, so memorable — that you would be hard-pressed to improve on it.

WRITING A PARAPHRASE

paraphrase is a restatement of all the information in a passage in your own words, using your own sentence structure and composed with your own audience in mind to advance your argument.

· When you paraphrase a passage, start by identifying key words and phrases, and think of other ways to state them. You may have to reread what led up to the passage to remind yourself of the context. For example, did the writer define terms earlier that he or she uses in the passage and now expects you to know?

· Continue by experimenting with word order and sentence structure, combining and recombining phrases to convey what the writer says without replicating his or her style. As you consider how best to state the writer’s idea in your own words, you should come to a much better understanding of what the writer is saying. By thinking critically, then, you are clarifying the passage for yourself as much as for your readers.

Let’s look at a paraphrase of a passage from science fiction writer and scholar James Gunn’s essay “Harry Potter as Schooldays Novel”i:

ORIGINAL PASSAGE

The situation and portrayal of Harry as an ordinary child with an extraordinary talent make him interesting. He elicits our sympathy at every turn. He plays a Cinderella-like role as the abused child of mean-spirited foster parents who favor other, less-worthy children, and also fits another fantasy role, that of changeling. Millions of children have nursed the notion that they cannot be the offspring of such unremarkable parents; in the Harry Potter books, the metaphor is often literal truth.

PARAPHRASE

According to James Gunn, the circumstances and depiction of Harry Potter as a normal boy with special abilities captivate us by playing on our empathy. Gunn observes that, like Cinderella, Harry is scorned by his guardians, who treat him far worse than they treat his less-admirable peers. And like another fairy-tale figure, the changeling, Harry embodies the fantasies of children who refuse to believe that they were born of their undistinguished parents (146).

In this paraphrase, the writer uses his own words to express key terms (circumstances and depiction for “situation and portrayal,” guardians for “foster parents”) and rearranges the structure of the original sentences. But the paraphrase is about the same length as the original and says essentially the same things as Gunn’s original.

Now, compare the paraphrase with this summary:

SUMMARY

James Gunn observes that Harry Potter’s character is compelling because readers empathize with Harry’s fairy tale–like plight as an orphan whose gifts are ignored by his foster parents (146).

The summary condenses the passage, conveying Gunn’s main point without restating the details. Notice how both the paraphrase and the summary indicate that the ideas are James Gunn’s, not the writer’s — “According to James Gunn,” “James Gunn observes” — and signal, with page references, where Gunn’s ideas end. It is essential that you acknowledge your sources, a subject we come back to in our discussion of plagiarism on page 228. The point we want to make here is that borrowing from the work of others is not always intentional. Many students stumble into plagiarism, especially when they are attempting to paraphrase. Remember that it’s not enough to change the words in a paraphrase; you must also change the structure of the sentences and cite your source.

You may be wondering: “If paraphrasing is so tricky, why bother? What does it add? I can see how the summary of Gunn’s paragraph presents information more concisely and efficiently than the original, but the paraphrase doesn’t seem to be all that different from the source and doesn’t seem to add anything to it. Why not simply quote the original or summarize it?”

Good questions. The answer is that you paraphrase when the ideas in a passage are important but the language is not key to your discussion or it may be difficult for readers to understand. When academics write for their peers, they draw on the specialized vocabulary of their disciplines to make their arguments. By paraphrasing, you may be helping your readers, providing a translation of sorts for those who do not speak the language.

Consider this paragraph by George Lipsitz from his academic book Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990), and compare the paraphrase that follows it:

ORIGINAL PASSAGE

The transformations in behavior and collective memory fueled by the contradictions of the nineteenth century have passed through three major stages in the United States. The first involved the establishment and codification of commercialized leisure from the invention of the telegraph to the 1890s. The second involved the transition from Victorian to consumer-hedonist values between 1890 and 1945. The third and most important stage, from World War II to the present, involved extraordinary expansion in both the distribution of consumer purchasing power and in both the reach and scope of electronic mass media. The dislocations of urban renewal, suburbanization, and deindustrialization accelerated the demise of tradition in America, while the worldwide pace of change undermined stability elsewhere. The period from World War II to the present marks the final triumph of commercialized leisure, and with it an augmented crisis over the loss of connection to the past.

PARAPHRASE

Historian George Lipsitz argues that Americans’ sense of the past is rooted in cultural changes dating from the 1800s and has evolved through three stages. In the first stage, technological innovations of the nineteenth century gave rise to widespread commercial entertainment. In the second stage, dating from the 1890s to about 1945, attitudes toward the consumption of goods and services changed. Since 1945, in the third stage, increased consumer spending and the growth of the mass media have led to a crisis in which Americans find themselves cut off from their traditions and the memories that give meaning to them (12).

Notice that the paraphrase is not a word-for-word translation of the original. Instead, the writer has made choices that resulted in a slightly briefer and more accessible restatement of Lipsitz’s thinking. (Although this paraphrase is shorter than the original passage, a paraphrase can also be a little longer than the original if extra words are needed to help readers understand the original.)

Notice too that several specialized terms and phrases from the original passage — the “codification of commercialized leisure,” “the transition from Victorian to consumer-hedonist values,” “the dislocations of urban renewal, suburbanization, and deindustrialization” — have disappeared. The writer not only looked up these terms and phrases in the dictionary but also reread the several pages that preceded the original passage to understand what Lipsitz meant by them.

The paraphrase is not meant to be an improvement on the original passage — in fact, historians would most likely prefer what Lipsitz wrote — but it may help readers who do not share Lipsitz’s expertise understand his point without distorting his argument.

Now compare this summary to the paraphrase:

SUMMARY

Historian George Lipsitz argues that technological, social, and economic changes dating from the nineteenth century have culminated in what he calls a “crisis over the loss of connection to the past,” in which Americans find themselves cut off from the memories of their traditions (12).

Which is better, the paraphrase or the summary? Neither is better or worse in and of itself. Their correctness and appropriateness depend on how the restatements are used in a given argument. That is, the decision to paraphrase or summarize depends entirely on the information you need to convey. Would the details in the paraphrase strengthen your argument? Or is a summary sufficient? In this case, if you plan to focus your argument on the causes of America’s loss of cultural memory (the rise of commercial entertainment, changes in spending habits, globalization), then a paraphrase might be more helpful. But if you plan to define loss of cultural memory, then a summary may provide enough context for the next stage of your argument.

Steps to Writing a Paraphrase

1. Decide whether to paraphrase. If your readers don’t need all the information in the passage, consider summarizing it or presenting the key points as part of a summary of a longer passage. If a passage is clear, concise, and memorable as originally written, consider quoting instead of paraphrasing. Otherwise, and especially if the original was written for an academic audience, you may want to paraphrase the original to make its substance more accessible to your readers.

2. Understand the passage. Start by identifying key words, phrases, and ideas. If necessary, reread the pages leading up to the passage, to place it in context.

3. Draft your paraphrase. Replace key words and phrases with synonyms and alternative phrases (possibly gleaned from the context provided by the surrounding text). Experiment with word order and sentence structure until the paraphrase captures your understanding of the passage, in your own language, for your readers.

4. Acknowledge your source. Protect yourself from a charge of plagiarism and give credit for ideas you borrow.

A Practice Sequence: Writing a Paraphrase

1. In one of the sources you’ve located in your research, find a sentence of some length and complexity, and paraphrase it. Share the original and your paraphrase of it with a classmate, and discuss the effectiveness of your restatement. Is the meaning clear to your reader? Is the paraphrase written in your own language, using your own sentence structure?

2. Repeat the activity using a short paragraph from the same source. You and your classmate may want to attempt to paraphrase the same paragraph and then compare results. What differences do you detect?

WRITING A SUMMARY

As you have seen, a summary condenses a body of information, presenting the key ideas and acknowledging the source. A common activity or assignment in a composition class is to summarize a text. You may be asked to read a text, reduce it to its main points, and convey them, without any details or examples, in a written summary. The goal of this assignment is to sharpen your reading and thinking skills as you learn to distinguish between main ideas and supporting details. Being able to distill information in this manner is crucial to critical thinking.

However, summarizing is not an active way to make an argument. While summaries do provide a common ground of information for your readers, you must shape that information to support the purposes of your researched argument with details that clarify, illustrate, or support their main ideas for your readers.

We suggest a method of summarizing that involves

1. describing the author’s key claims,

2. selecting examples to illustrate the author’s argument,

3. presenting the gist of the author’s argument, and

4. contextualizing what you summarize.

We demonstrate these steps for writing a summary following Clive Thompson’s article “On the New Literacy.”

CLIVE THOMPSON

On the New Literacy

A print journalist at New York Magazine, Clive Thompson started his blog, Collision Detection, in September 2002, when he was beginning his year as a Knight Fellow in Science Journalism at MIT. Collision Detection has become one of the most well-regarded blogs on technology and culture. The blog receives approximately 3,000 to 4,000 hits a day. His piece on literacy appeared in Wired magazine in 2009.

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write — and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to e-mails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it — and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom — life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos — assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

Of course, good teaching is always going to be crucial, as is the mastering of formal academic prose. But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision. At the same time, the proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis — from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs — has given them a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.

We think of writing as either good or bad. What today’s young people know is that knowing who you’re writing for and why you’re writing might be the most crucial factor of all.

◼ Describe the Key Claims of the Text

As you read through a text with the purpose of summarizing it, you want to identify how the writer develops his or her argument. You can do this by what we call “chunking,” grouping related material together into the argument’s key claims. Here are two strategies to try.

Notice how paragraphs begin and end.

 

Often, focusing on the first and last sentences of paragraphs will alert you to the shape and direction of an author’s argument. It is especially helpful if the paragraphs are lengthy and full of supporting information, as much academic writing is.

Because of his particular journalistic forum, Wired magazine, the paragraphs Thompson writes are generally rather short, but it’s still worth taking a closer look at the first and last sentences of his opening paragraphs:

Paragraph 1 : As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write — and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?

Paragraph 2 : Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples — everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to e-mails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

Right away you can see that Thompson has introduced a topic in each paragraph — pundits’ criticism of students’ use of electronic media in the first, and a national study designed to examine students’ literacy in the second — and has indicated a connection between them. In fact, Thompson is explicit in doing so. He asks a question at the end of the first paragraph and then raises doubts as to the legitimacy of critics’ denunciation of young people’s reliance on blogs and posts to communicate. How will Thompson elaborate on this connection? What major points does he develop?

Notice the author’s point of view and use of transitions.

 

Another strategy for identifying major points is to pay attention to descriptive words and transitions. For example, Thompson uses a rhetorical question (“An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?”) and then offers a tentative answer (“Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure”) that places some doubt in readers’ minds.

Notice, too, the words that Thompson uses to characterize the argument in the first paragraph, which he appears to challenge in the second paragraph. Specifically, he describes these critics as “pundits,” a word that traditionally refers to an expert or knowledgeable individual. However, the notion of a pundit, someone who often appears on popular talk shows, has also been used negatively. Thompson’s description of pundits “fretting,” wringing their hands in worry that literacy levels are declining, underscores this negative association of what it means to be a pundit. Finally, Thompson indicates that he does not identify with those who describe students as engaging in “narcissistic blabbering.” This is clear when he characterizes the professor as having “moaned.”

Once you identify an author’s point of view, you will start noticing contrasts and oppositions in the argument — instances where the words are less positive, or neutral, or even negative — which are often signaled by how the writer uses transitions.

For example, Thompson begins with his own concession to critics’ arguments when he acknowledges in paragraph 8 that educators should expect students to “[master] formal academic prose.” However, he follows this concession with the transition word “but” to signal his own stance in the debate he frames in the first two paragraphs: “online media are pushing literacy into cool directions.” Thompson also recognizes that students who write on blogs tend to write short, abbreviated texts. Still, he qualifies his concern with another transition, “at the same time.” This transition serves to introduce Thompson’s strongest claim: New media have given students “a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.”

These strategies can help you recognize the main points of an essay and explain them in a few sentences. For example, you could describe Thompson’s key claims in this way:

1. Electronic media give students opportunities to write more than in previous generations, and students have learned to adapt what they are writing in order to have some tangible effect on what people think and how they act.

2. Arguably, reliance on blogging and posting on Twitter and Facebook can foster some bad habits in writing.

3. But at least one major study demonstrates that the benefits of using the new media outweigh the disadvantages. This study indicates that students write lengthy, complex pieces that contribute to creating significant social networks and collaborations.

◼ Select Examples to Illustrate the Author’s Argument

A summary should be succinct, which means you should limit the number of examples or illustrations you use. As you distill the major points of the argument, try to choose one or two examples to illustrate each major point. Here are the examples (in italics) you might use to support Thompson’s main points:

1. Electronic media give students opportunities to write more than in previous generations, and students have learned to adapt what they are writing in order to have some tangible effect on what people think and how they act. Examples from the Stanford study: Students “defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating” (para. 7).

2. Arguably, reliance on blogging and posting on Twitter and Facebook can foster some bad habits in writing. Examples of these bad habits include critics’ charges of “narcissistic blabbering,” “bleak, bald, sad shorthand,” and “dehydrated language” (para. 1). Thompson’s description of texting’s “haiku-like concision” (para. 8seems to combine praise (haiku can be wonderful poetry) with criticism (it can be obscure and unintelligible).

3. But at least one major study demonstrates that the benefits of using the new media outweigh the disadvantages. Examples include Thompson’s point that the writing in the new media constitutes a “paradigm shift” (para. 5). Andrea Lunsford observes that students are “remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos — assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across” (para. 6).

A single concrete example may be sufficient to clarify the point you want to make about an author’s argument. Throughout the essay, Thompson derives examples from the Stanford study to support his argument in the final two paragraphs. The most concrete, specific example of how the new media benefit students as writers appears in paragraph 6, where the primary research of the Stanford study describes students’ acquisition of important rhetorical skills of developing writing that is opportune (kairos) and purposeful. This one example may be sufficient for the purposes of summarizing Thompson’s essay.

◼ Present the Gist of the Author’s Argument

When you present the gist of an argument, you are expressing the author’s central idea in a sentence or two. The gist is not quite the same thing as the author’s thesis statement. Instead, it is your formulation of the author’s main idea, composed for the needs of your own argument.

Thompson’s observations in paragraph 8 represent his thesis: “But it’s also becoming clear that online media are pushing literacy into cool directions. . . . [T]he proliferation of new forms of online pop-cultural exegesis — from sprawling TV-show recaps to 15,000-word videogame walkthroughs — has given [students] a chance to write enormously long and complex pieces of prose, often while working collaboratively with others.” In this paragraph, Thompson clearly expresses his central ideas in two sentences, while also conceding some of the critics’ concerns. However, in formulating the gist of his argument, you want to do more than paraphrase Thompson. You want to use his position to support your own. For example, suppose you want to qualify the disapproval that some educators have expressed in drawing their conclusions about the new media. You would want to mention Thompson’s own concessions when you describe the gist of his argument:

GIST

In his essay “On the New Literacy,” Clive Thompson, while acknowledging some academic criticism of new media, argues that these media give students opportunities to write more than in previous generations and that students have learned to adapt what they are writing in order to have some tangible effect on what people think and how they act.

Notice that this gist could not have been written based only on Thompson’s thesis statement. It reflects knowledge of Thompson’s major points, his examples, and his concessions.

◼ Contextualize What You Summarize

Your summary should help readers understand the context of the conversation:

· Who is the author?

· What is the author’s expertise?

· What is the title of the work?

· Where did the work appear?

· What was the occasion of the work’s publication? What prompted the author to write the work?

· What are the issues?

· Who else is taking part in the conversation, and what are their perspectives on the issues?

Again, because a summary must be concise, you must make decisions about how much of the conversation your readers need to know. If your assignment is to practice summarizing, it may be sufficient to include only information about the author and the source. However, if you are using the summary to build your own argument, you may need to provide more context. Your practice summary of Thompson’s essay should mention that he is a journalist and should cite the title of and page references to his essay. You also may want to include information about Thompson’s audience, publication information, and what led to the work’s publication. Was it published in response to another essay or book, or to commemorate an important event?

We compiled our notes on Thompson’s essay (key claims, examples, gist, context) in a worksheet (Figure 3.1). All of our notes in the worksheet constitute a type of prewriting, our preparation for writing the summary. Creating a worksheet like this can help you track your thoughts as you plan to write a summary.

A table with four columns and three rows is shown.

The column headers read as follows: Key Claim(s); Examples; Gist, Context.

The data reads as follows:

Row 1: Key Claims (s), 1. Electronic media prompt more student writing than ever before, and students use their writing to make a difference; Example, The Stanford study: Students “defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world” (para. 7). ; Gist, In his essay “On the New Literacy,” Clive Thompson, while acknowledging some academic criticism of new media, argues that these media give students opportunities to write more than in previous generations and that students have learned to adapt what they are writing in order to have some tangible effect on what people think and how they act. ; Context, Thompson is a journalist who has written widely on issues in higher education. His essay “On the New Literacy” appeared in Wired in August 2009 (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson). Under consideration is the debate that he frames in his opening paragraphs.

Row 2: Key Claims (s), Arguably, reliance on blogging and posting can foster some bad writing habits.; Example, Complaints of “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” and “narcissistic blabbering” (para. 1); texting can be obscure. ; Gist, empty; Context, empty ;

Row 3: Key Claims (s), But one major study shows the benefits of new media on student writing.; Example, But one major study shows the benefits of new media on student writing. ; Gist, empty ; Context, empty ;

FIGURE 3.1Worksheet for Writing a Summary

Here is our summary of Thompson’s essay:

A paragraph shows with annotations.

The paragraph reads, “In his essay “On the New Literacy,” Clive Thompson, while acknowledging some academic criticism of new media, argues that these media give students opportunities to write more than in previous generations and that students have learned to adapt what they are writing in order to have some tangible effect on what people think and how they act. Arguably, reliance on blogging and posting on Twitter and Facebook can foster some bad habits in writing. But at least one major study demonstrates that the benefits of using the new media outweigh the disadvantages. Students write lengthy, complex pieces that contribute to creating significant social networks and collaborations.”

The annotation for “In his essay “On the New Literacy,” Clive Thompson, while acknowledging some academic criticism of new media, argues that these media give students opportunities to write more than in previous generations and that students have learned to adapt what they are writing in order to have some tangible effect on what people think and how they act” reads, “The gist of Thompson’s argument.”

The annotation for, “Arguably, reliance on blogging and posting on Twitter and

Facebook can foster some bad habits in writing” reads, “This concession helps to balance enthusiasm based on a single study.”

The annotation for “Students write lengthy, complex pieces that contribute to creating significant social networks and collaborations” reads, “Thompson’s main point with example.”

Steps to Writing a Summary

1. Describe the key claims of the text. To understand the shape and direction of the argument, study how paragraphs begin and end, and pay attention to the author’s point of view and use of transitions. Then combine what you have learned into a few sentences describing the key claims.

2. Select examples to illustrate the author’s argument. Find one or two examples to support each key claim. You may need only one example when you write your summary.

3. Present the gist of the author’s argument. Describe the author’s central idea in your own language with an eye to where you expect your argument to go.

4. Contextualize what you summarize. Cue your readers into the conversation. Who is the author? Where and when did the text appear? Why did the author write? Who else is in the conversation?

A Practice Sequence: Writing a Summary

1. Summarize a text that you have been studying for research or for one of your other classes. You may want to limit yourself to an excerpt of just a few paragraphs or a few pages. Follow the four steps we’ve described, using a summary worksheet for notes, and write a summary of the text. Then share the excerpt and your summary of it with two of your peers. Be prepared to justify your choices in composing the summary. Do your peers agree that your summary captures what is important in the original?

2. With a classmate, choose a brief text of about three pages. Each of you should use the method we describe above to write a summary of the text. Exchange your summaries and worksheets, and discuss the effectiveness of your summaries. Each of you should be prepared to discuss your choice of key claims and examples and your wording of the gist. Did you set forth the context effectively?

WRITING YOURSELF INTO ACADEMIC CONVERSATIONS

In her essay “The Flight from Conversation” (see p. 59), Sherry Turkle reflects upon her research on mobile technology and what she sees as the unfortunate trend toward “sacrificing conversation for mere connection.” You are probably familiar with the experience of walking into a coffee shop or the library on campus and seeing friends sitting across from one another but engaged with laptops or phones instead of with each other. “Alone together,” as Turkle puts it, and she laments the “diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection,” a habit of mind that we agree is vital to academic writing and thinking. Thus, she blames technology that encourages broad and shallow connection without real face-to-face engagement. But as we also suggest, much academic conversation occurs on the page and screen, involving the exchange of ideas through writing. The philosopher Kenneth Burke uses this metaphor of an ongoing parlor conversation to capture the spirit of academic writing:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.ii

Now that you have learned some important skills of rhetorical analysis and summary, then, it is important to think about ways to write yourself into academic conversations. Doing so will depend on three strategies:

· which previously stated arguments you share;

· which previously stated argument you want to refute; and

· what new opinions and supporting information you are going to bring to the conversation.

You may, for example, affirm others for raising important issues about the environment, employment opportunities, or the tendency of new technologies to limit community building and democratic deliberation. Then again, as you consider the arguments of others, you may feel that they have not given sufficient thought or emphasis to ideas that you think are important. In the end, you can write yourself into the conversation by explaining that writers have ignored a related issue entirely. So you are looking for gaps in others’ arguments — something we discuss in more detail in the chapters that follow — an opening that provides an opportunity to provide a unique perspective in the conversation of ideas.

Steps to Writing Yourself into an Academic Conversation

· Retrace the conversation, including the relevance of the topic and situation, for readers by briefly discussing an author’s key claims and ideas. This discussion can be as brief as a sentence or two and include a quotation for each author you cite.

· Respond to the ideas of others by helping readers understand the context in which another’s claims make sense. “I get this if I see it this way.”

· Discuss possible implications by putting problems aside and asking, “Do their claims make sense?”

· Introduce conflicting points of view and raise possible criticisms to indicate something the authors whose ideas you discuss may have overlooked.

· Formulate your own claim to assert what you think.

· Ensure that your own purpose as a writer is clear to readers.

A Practice Sequence: Writing Yourself into an Academic Conversation

1. We would like you to read an excerpt from Tom Standage’s book Writing on the Wall, follow the steps to writing yourself into the conversation, and write a short, one-page argument. In doing so, retrace the conversation by explaining Standage’s argument in ways that demonstrate your understanding of it. In turn, formulate your own position by explaining whether you believe that Standage has represented the issue well. Is there an opening in his argument that enables you to offer a perspective that he has perhaps ignored or overlooked?

2. An option for group work:

· As a group, discuss Sherry Turkle’s argument in Chapter 2 that mobile technology has led to sacrificing conversation for mere connection — that we are “alone together.” List the reasons why her argument makes sense and reasons why your group might take issue with her perspective. What do you feel she might have ignored or overlooked?

· Next, compare Turkle’s argument with Standage’s point of view in which he challenges Turkle’s assertion that new technologies encourage “flight from conversation.”

· Finally, each member of the group should write an argument that takes into account the conversation that Turkle and Standage have initiated with their efforts to make sense of how mobile technology has affected our lives.

TOM STANDAGE

History Retweets Itself

A writer and journalist from England with a degree from Oxford University, Tom Standage has published six books, including The Victorian Internet and Writing on the Wall, from which the excerpt that follows is taken. He has published articles on science, technology, and business in the New York Times, Wired, and the Daily Telegraph. He has also worked as a science and technology writer for the Guardian and deputy editor at The Economist.

Social media, whether in the form of the printing press or the Internet, can be a force for freedom and openness, simply because oppressive regimes often rely on manipulating their citizens’ view of the world, and a more open media environment makes that harder to accomplish. But the other side of the scales is not empty; this benefit must be weighed against the fact that social media can make repression easier, too. As Morozov notes, the Internet “penetrates and reshapes all walks of political life, not just the ones conducive to democratization.” Anyone who hopes that the Internet will spread Western-style liberal democracy must bear in mind that the same digital tools have also been embraced by campaigners with very different aims, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and ultra-right-wing nationalist groups in Russia. The test case in this argument is China, which now has more Internet users than any other country — more than in North America and Europe combined. Weibo and other online forums have given Chinese Internet users unprecedented freedom to express their views. Yet the swift and ruthless censoring of blog posts and weibo messages criticizing senior officials or calling for real-world demonstrations shows that widespread Internet adoption need not necessarily threaten the regime. Indeed, the ability to monitor the Internet may make it easier for the government to keep the lid on dissent.

A rather more mundane but widely expressed concern about social media is that the ease with which anyone can now publish his or her views online, whether on Twitter, on blogs, or in comment threads, has led to a coarsening of public discourse. Racism, sexism, bigotry, incivility, and ignorance abound in many online discussion forums. Twitter allows anyone to send threats or abuse directly to other users. No wonder the Internet is often likened to a sewer by politicians, clergymen, and newspaper columnists.

Yet the history of media shows that this is just the modern incarnation of the timeless complaint of the intellectual elite, every time technology makes publishing easier, that the wrong sort of people will use it to publish the wrong sorts of things. In the early sixteenth century, Erasmus complained that printers “fill the world with pamphlets and books that are foolish, ignorant, malignant, libelous, mad, impious and subversive; and such is the flood that even things that might have done some good lose all their goodness.” Worse, these “swarms of new books” were “hurtful to scholarship” because they lured readers away from the classics, which is what Erasmus felt people ought to have been reading.

Printers had, however, quickly realized that there was a far larger audience, and more money to be made, printing pamphlets and contemporary works rather than new editions of classical works. Similarly, in England, the Worshipful Company of Stationers bemoaned the explosion of unlicensed pamphlets that appeared after the collapse of press controls in 1641, complaining that “every ignorant person that takes advantage of a loose presse may publish the fancies of every idle brain as so manyfestly appeareth by the swarmes of scandalous and irksome pamphletts that are cryed about the streetes.” The Company was hoping to be granted a renewed monopoly on printing, which had previously allowed it to control what was printed, and therefore what people read. Its grumbling is not dissimilar to that of professional journalists bemoaning the rise of pajama-clad bloggers, invading their turf and challenging the status quo.

Those in authority always squawk, it seems, when access to publishing is broadened. Greater freedom of expression, as John Milton noted in Areopagitica, means that bad ideas will proliferate as well as good ones, but it also means that bad ideas are more likely to be challenged. Better to provide an outlet for bigotry and prejudice, so they can be argued against and addressed, than to pretend that such views, and the people who hold them, do not exist. In a world where almost anyone can publish his or her views, the alternative, which is to restrict freedom of expression, is surely worse. As Milton’s contemporary Henry Robinson put it in 1644, “It were better that many false doctrines were published, especially with a good intention and out of weaknesse only, than that one sound truth should be forcibly smothered or wilfully concealed; and by the incongruities and absurdities which accompany erroneous and unsound doctrines, the truth appears still more glorious, and wins others to the love thereof.” One man’s coarsening of discourse is another man’s democratization of publishing. The genie is out of the bottle. Let truth and falsehood grapple!

Whatever you think about the standards of online discussions, there is no doubt that people are spending a lot of time engaging in them. This raises another concern: that social media is a distracting waste of time that diverts people from more worthwhile pursuits, such as work and study. Surveys carried out in 2009 found that more than half of British and American companies had banned workers from using Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites. Many employers also block access to LinkedIn, a social-networking site for business users, because they worry that it allows employees to spend their time networking and advertising themselves to other potential employers. Simply put, companies readily equate social networking with social notworking.

This too is a familiar worry. Coffeehouses, the social-media platforms of their day, inspired similar reactions in the seventeenth century. They were denounced in the 1670s as “a vast loss of time grown out of a pure novelty” and “great enemies to diligence and industry.” But the mixing of people and ideas that occurred in coffeehouses, where patrons from many walks of life would gather to discuss the latest pamphlets, led to innovations in science, commerce, and finance. By providing an environment in which unexpected connections could be made, coffeehouses proved to be hotbeds of collaborative innovation.

Similarly, a growing number of companies have concluded that social networking does have a role to play in the workplace, if done in the right way. They have set up “enterprise social networks,” which create a private, Facebook-like social network to facilitate communication among employees and, in some cases, with workers at client and supplier companies, too. This sort of approach seems to have several benefits: its similarity to Facebook means little or no training is required; sharing documents and communicating via discussion threads is more efficient than using e-mail; it is easier to discover employees’ hidden knowledge and talents; and it makes it easier for far-flung teams to collaborate.

A study by McKinsey and Company, a management consulting firm, found that the use of social networking within companies could increase the productivity of skilled knowledge workers by 20 to 25 percent and that the adoption of the technology in four industries (consumer goods, financial services, professional services, and advanced manufacturing) could create economic benefits worth between $900 billion and $1.3 trillion a year. Such predictions should always be taken with a very large dose of salt, but McKinsey found that 70 percent of companies were already using social technologies to some extent; and more than 90 percent said they were already benefitting as a result. Far from being a waste of time, then, Facebook-like social networks may in fact be the future of business software.

Even if it has value in the office, however, is there a danger that social media is harming our personal lives? Some observers worry that social media is in fact antisocial, because it encourages people to commune with people they barely know online to the detriment of real-life relationships with family and friends. “Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?” writes Sherry Turkle, an academic at MIT, in her book Alone Together. She worries that “relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down.” Similarly, William Powers, author of Hamlet’s BlackBerry, laments the way that his family would rather chat with their online friends than with each other. “The digital crowd has a way of elbowing its way into everything, to the point where a family can’t sit in a room together for half an hour without somebody, or everybody, peeling off,” he writes. His proposed solution: an “Unplugged Sunday” when the use of computers and smartphones is banned.

It is clear that the desire to be connected to one’s distant friends, using whatever technology is available, is timeless. Cicero particularly valued the way letters connected him to his friends in the months after the death of his beloved daughter Tullia in 45 B.C. And he relished the contact his daily letters with his friend Atticus provided, even when they contained little information. “Write to me . . . every day,” he wrote to Atticus. “When you have nothing to say, why, say just that!” Concerns about unhealthy dependence on new media technologies also have a long history: recall Plato’s objections to writing in the Phaedrus, and Seneca’s derision of his fellow Romans as they rushed to the docks to get their mail. By the seventeenth century, satirists were lampooning news junkies and the hunger with which they sought out the latest corantos.

From Roman letter-writers to manuscript poetry-sharing networks to news-sharing clergymen in the American colonies, the exchange of media has long been used to reinforce social connections. The same is true today. Zeynep Tufekci, a media theorist at Princeton University, suggests that the popularity of social media stems from its ability to reconnect people in a world of suburbanization, long working hours, and families scattered around the globe by migration. Social media, she argues, is also a welcome antidote to the lonely, one-way medium of television. People who use social media can stay in contact with people they would otherwise lose touch with and make contact with like-minded individuals they might otherwise have never met. “Social media is enhancing human connectivity as people can converse in ways that were once not possible,” Tufekci argues. A study published in 2011 by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania concluded that “it is incorrect to maintain that the Internet benefits distant relationships at the expense of local ties. The Internet affords personal connections at extreme distances but also provides the opportunity for new and supplemental local interaction.” Another analysis, conducted in 2009 by researchers at the University of Toronto and involving four thousand Canadians, found that 35 percent felt that technology made them feel closer and more connected to other family members, and only 7 percent said that technology made them feel less connected. Tellingly, 51% of respondents said it made no difference, which suggests that many people no longer make a distinction between online and offline worlds, but regard them as an integrated whole.

New technologies are often regarded with suspicion. Turkle worries about the “flight from conversation,” citing teenagers who would rather send a text than make a phone call. And on Unplugged Sunday, Powers and his family engage in communal pursuits that include watching television together. It seems odd to venerate the older technologies of the telephone and the television, though, given that they were once condemned for being anti-social in the same way social media is denounced today. (“Does the telephone make men more active or more lazy? Does it break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends?” asked a survey carried out in San Francisco in 1926.) There is always an adjustment period when new technologies appear, as societies work out the appropriate etiquette for their use and technologies are modified in response. During this transitional phase, which takes years or even decades, technologies are often criticized for disrupting existing ways of doing things. But the technology that is demonized today may end up being regarded as wholesome and traditional tomorrow, by which time another apparently dangerous new invention will be causing the same concerns.

What clues can history provide about the future evolution of social media? Even though Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms provide a way for people to share information by sharing along social connections, they still resemble old-fashioned media companies such as newspapers and broadcasters in two ways: they are centralized (even though the distribution of information is carried out by the users, rather than the platform owners) and they rely on advertising for the majority of their revenue. Centralization grants enormous power to the owners of social platforms, giving them the ability to suspend or delete users’ accounts and censor information if they choose to do so—or are compelled to do so by governments. Relying on advertising revenue, meanwhile, means platform owners must keep both advertisers and users happy, even though their interests do not always align. As they try to keep users within the bounds of their particular platforms, to maximize their audience for advertising, the companies that operate social networks have started to impose restrictions on what their customers can do and on how easily information can be moved from one social platform to another. In their early days, it makes sense for new social platforms to be as open as possible, to attract a large number of users. Having done so, however, such platforms often try to fence their users into “walled gardens” as they start trying to make money.

The contrast between big social platforms on the one hand, and e-mail and the web on the other, is striking. Both e-mail and web publishing work in an entirely open, decentralized way. The servers that store and deliver e-mail and the programs used to read and write messages are all expected to work seamlessly with each other, and for the most part they do. The same is true of web servers, which store and deliver pages, and the web browsers used to display pages and navigate between them. Anyone who wants to set up a new e-mail or web server can add it to the Internet’s existing ecosystem of such servers. If you are setting up a new blog or website, there are also plenty of companies to choose from who will host it for you, and you can move from one to another if you are unsatisfied with their service. None of this is true for social networking, however, which takes place inside huge, proprietary silos owned by private companies. Moving your photos, your list of friends, or your archive of posts from one service to another is difficult at best, and impossible at worst. It may be that healthy competition among those companies, and a reluctance to alienate their hundreds of millions of users by becoming too closed, will enable the big social platforms to continue in this semi-open state for many years to come.

But another possibility is that today’s social platforms represent a transitional stage, like AOL and CompuServe in the 1990s. They were proprietary, centralized services that introduced millions of people to the wonders of the Internet, but they were eventually swept aside by the open web. Similarly, perhaps the core features of social networking and social media — maintaining lists of friends, and exchanging information with them — will move to an open, decentralized model. Such a model is possible for e-mail and web publishing because of the existence of agreed technical standards on how e-mail messages and web pages ought to be encoded and transmitted. Several such standards have already been proposed for decentralized or distributed social networks, though none has yet gained much traction. There will be technical difficulties synchronizing friend lists, maintaining privacy and security, and delivering updates quickly across millions of users, all of which give centralized social networks a clear advantage at the moment. But every time a major social network is involved in a privacy violation, an unpopular change in the terms of service, or a spat over censorship, a few more adventurous users decide to give one of the various decentralized social networks a try. “I think it’s important to design new systems that work in a distributed way,” says Tim Berners-Lee. “We must make systems in which people can collaborate together, but do it in a way that’s decentralized, so it’s not based on one central hub.”

A decentralized social platform could be based around personal silos of data over which users would have direct control. This approach would also address concerns that the new online public sphere that has been brought into being by social media is largely in the hands of private companies who are beholden to advertisers and shareholders rather than users. But there is another way for Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to make themselves more accountable to users and less dependent on advertisers: to start charging users for some or all services. Many Internet services operate on a model in which a small percentage of paying customers subsidize a much larger number of nonpaying users. Social platforms could charge for things such as providing detailed analytics to commercial users of their platforms, more customization options for user profiles, or an advertising-free service. App.net, a subscription-funded Twitter-like service launched in September 2012, prides itself on being an “ad-free social network” that is based on “selling our product, not our users.” This ensures, the company says, that its financial incentives are aligned with those of its members. Whether or not its particular model proves to have broad appeal, the future of social media is likely to see new models based on decentralized architectures and paying customers being added to the mix.

But whatever form social media takes in the future, one thing is clear: it is not going away. As this book has argued, social media is not new. It has been around for centuries. Today, blogs are the new pamphlets. Microblogs and online social networks are the new coffeehouses. Media-sharing sites are the new commonplace books. They are all shared, social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the privileged bottleneck of broadcast media. The rebirth of social media in the Internet age represents a profound shift — and a return, in many respects, to the way things used to be.

4From Identifying Claims to Analyzing Arguments

Aclaim is an assertion of fact or belief that needs to be supported with evidence — the information that backs up a claim. A main claim, or thesis, summarizes the writer’s position on a situation and answers the question(s) the writer addresses. It also encompasses the minor claims, along with their supporting evidence, that the writer makes throughout the argument.

As readers, we need to identify a writer’s main claim, or thesis, because it helps us organize our own understanding of the writer’s argument. It acts as a signpost that tells us, “This is what the essay is about,” “This is what I want you to pay attention to,” and “This is how I want you to think, change, or act.”

When you evaluate a claim, whether it is an argument’s main claim or a minor claim, it is helpful to identify the type of claim it is: a claim of fact, a claim of value, or a claim of policy. You also need to evaluate the reasons for the claim and the evidence that supports it. Because academic argument should acknowledge multiple points of view, you should also be prepared to identify what, if any, concessions a writer offers his or her readers, and what counterarguments he or she anticipates from others in the conversation.

IDENTIFYING TYPES OF CLAIMS

To illustrate how to identify a writer’s claims, let’s take a look at a text written by an educator in the field of business ethics, Dana Radcliffe, that examines the relationship between social media and democracy. The text is followed by our analysis of the types of claims (fact, value, and policy) and then, in the next section, of the nature of arguments (use of evidence, concessions, and counterarguments) the author presents.

DANA RADCLIFFE

Dashed Hopes: Why Aren’t Social Media Delivering Democracy?

Dana Radcliffe has taught business ethics at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University since 2000. As an adjunct at Syracuse University, he teaches ethics courses in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the College of Engineering and Computer Science. As a blogger for the Huffington Post, he has written about ethics in business, politics, and public policy. Professor Radcliffe earned a PhD from Syracuse University, an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MPhil in philosophy from Yale University, and a BA in philosophy from Fort Hays State University. This essay is a version of remarks presented to a session of the Pacific Council on International Policy, October 10, 2015. It follows up on his 2011 blog post “Can Social Media Undermine Democracy?”

Four years ago, in the months following the Arab Spring,1 hopes ran high that the growing use of social media would bring a flowering of democracy throughout the world. Facebook and Twitter had helped dissidents drive tyrants from power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. In established democracies, citizens’ groups — most notably, the Tea Party in the U.S. — were influencing politics by leveraging social media. Indeed, a Forbes cover story on the power of social media concluded that “the world is becoming more democratic and reflective of the will of ordinary people.”

Sadly, such optimism proved ill-founded. Now, in 2015, popular government seems to be receding globally. With the qualified exception of Tunisia, the Arab Spring did not transform dictatorships into democracies, and democratic governments seem unable to find consensus solutions to many pressing policy questions. What happened? Why haven’t social media made the world more democratic?

In seeking an answer, we can begin with [the] nature of democracy itself. Because a country’s citizens have competing interests and values, their effectively governing themselves through elections of leaders and other democratic processes requires deliberation. It requires that citizens and their representatives discuss and debate what the government should or should not do, defending their views by appealing to shared principles and purposes. As one scholar, Daniel Gayo-Avello, recently observed, “Deliberation is crucial in modern democracy . . . Proper democratic deliberation assumes that citizens are equal participants, opposing viewpoints are not only accepted but encouraged, and that the main goal is to achieve ‘rationally motivated consensus. ’ ” Political philosophers Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, in their influential Democracy and Disagreement (Belknap, 1996), point out that “the demand for deliberation has been a familiar theme in the American constitutional tradition. It is integral to the ideal of republican government as the founders understood it. James Madison judged the design of political institutions in part by how well they furthered deliberation.”

To be sure, “deliberative democracy” is an ideal to which existing democratic systems only roughly approximate. Nevertheless, the concept provides a plausible standard for evaluating democracies. Moreover, it reminds us that the health of a democracy depends in large part on its fostering deliberation that leads to policies whose legitimacy most citizens accept. Hence, the impact of social media on democratic deliberation may help explain why they have not brought about a new global era of democracy.

The issue here is the political power of social media, and it entails three key questions: What power do they confer? Who possesses that power? How do those who have the power use it?

First, the power of social media is evident. Functionally, it is the ability to communicate, instantaneously, with a large number of people. Politically, it is the power to inform or misinform, to engage or manipulate, to mobilize or control. In general, it is the power to affect, directly and on a vast scale, the political beliefs and actions of citizens.

Second, when the government controls social media, this power is in its hands. When the government does not control social media, its political power belongs to citizens who can access them and is exercised by groups of like-minded individuals who use them to organize and coordinate political activities.

Third, as for how the political power of social media is wielded by those who possess them, recent history gives us some salient examples:

· Protesters using them in organizing mass demonstrations against oppressive governments during the Arab Spring;

· the Chinese government’s allowing critics of public officials and policies to “vent” online but tightly censoring calls for collective action;

· the Russian government’s employing its immense digital propaganda machine to convince many Europeans that the CIA shot down the Malaysian airliner over Ukraine;

· the Islamic State’s utilizing social media to recruit disaffected Muslim youths from around the world;

· in 2008, the Obama campaign’s innovative application of social media to raise record amounts of money from small donors and customize its messages to different demographics;

· the use of social media by an impassioned minority of Americans angry at “big government” to form and advance the Tea Party movement.

In all these cases, social media were — or are — used as political weapons. Of course, I am not implying moral equivalence in these examples. My point is that the political power of social media has been used most effectively in adversarial contexts — in circumstances of struggle or competition. In those cases, the regime, organization, or group holding the power uses it against individuals, groups, or institutions whose interests or goals conflict with theirs. Consequently, whether they are revolutionaries, totalitarian governments, candidates for office, or special interests, political partisans using social media as tactical weapons are not concerned about deliberation.

Who, then, cares about promoting democratic deliberation? It is citizens and leaders who understand that democratic processes necessitate deliberative disagreement and, in the legislative process, negotiation and compromise. However, when these advocates of democracy look to social media to establish and strengthen democratic processes, they encounter a basic problem: social media appear unsuited to serve as forums of political deliberation. Research into online behavior suggests several reasons:

· Users tend not to seek opportunities to engage in serious political dialogue with people whose views differ from their own. Rather, as social media expert Curtis Hougland notes, “people choose to reinforce their existing political opinions through their actions online.”

· A recent Pew Research Center report offers evidence that people are much less willing to post their political views on social media when they believe their followers would disagree with them.

· Daniel Gayo-Avello has found that “when political discussions occur they are not rational and democratic deliberations . . . [because] political information in social media generally lacks quality and strong arguments, is usually incoherent and highly opinionated.”

To these I would add some intuitions of mine:

· When people who have strong political opinions avoid engaging opponents in reasoned debate but have them bolstered by social media followers, they tend to become more rigid in those views — and so, are even less interested in democratic deliberation.

· As a result, political partisans connected through social media tend to oppose legislative compromises on their pet issues, demanding that elected representatives they support “stand on principle,” regardless of political realities or the common good.

· Finally, perhaps because using social media is, physically, a solitary activity, it tends not to cultivate civic virtues — such as respect for opponents — that Gutmann and Thompson argue are critical to democratic deliberation.

In short, with regard to political discussion, current use of social media favors affinity over engagement, expression over debate, silence over disagreement, dogmatism over compromise, and — toward opponents — disdain over respect. This, I believe, is largely why we have so far been unable to move beyond the use of social media as political weapons to make them instruments of deliberative democracy.

◼ Identify Claims of Fact

Claims of fact are assertions (or arguments) that seek to define or classify something or establish that a problem or condition has existed, exists, or will exist. Claims of fact are made by individuals who believe that something is true; but claims are never simply facts, and some claims are more objective, and so easier to verify, than others.

For example, “It’s raining in Portland today” is a “factual” claim of fact; it’s easily verified. But consider the argument some make that the steel and automotive industries in the United States have depleted our natural resources and left us at a crisis point. This is an assertion that a condition exists. A careful reader must examine the basis for this kind of claim: Are we truly facing a crisis? And if so, are the steel and automotive industries truly responsible? A number of politicians counter this claim of fact by insisting that if the government were to harness the vast natural resources in Alaska, there would be no “crisis.” This is also a claim of fact, in this case an assertion that a condition will exist in the future. Again, it is based on evidence, evidence gathered from various sources that indicates sufficient resources in Alaska to keep up with our increasing demands for resources and to allay a potential crisis.

Our point is that most claims of fact are debatable and challenge us to provide evidence to verify our arguments. They may be based on factual information, but they are not necessarily true. Most claims of fact present interpretations of evidence derived from inferences. That is, a writer will examine evidence (for example, about the quantity of natural resources in Alaska and the rate that industries harness those resources and process them into goods), draw a conclusion based on reasoning (an inference), and offer an explanation based on that conclusion (an interpretation).

So, for example, an academic writer will study the evidence on the quantity of natural resources in Alaska and the rate that industries harness those resources and process them into goods; only after the writer makes an informed decision on whether Alaska’s resources are sufficient to keep pace with the demand for them will he or she take a position on the issue.

Claims that seek to define or classify are also claims of fact. For example, researchers have sought to define a range of behaviors such as autism that actually resist simple definition. After all, autism exists along a behavioral spectrum attributed variably to genetics and environment. Psychologists have indeed tried to define autism using a diagnostic tool to characterize behaviors associated with communication and social interaction. However, definitions of autism have changed over time, reflecting changing criteria for assessing human behavior and the perspective one takes. So do we in fact have a “crisis” in the over diagnosis of autistic behaviors as some have claimed? For that matter, who gets to decide what counts as a crisis?

Let’s now come to Radcliffe’s claim of fact that social media services have not fulfilled the promise of fostering a more democratic world, nor have they promoted (as the Forbes article asserts) “the will of ordinary people.” Despite a few exceptions in which social media services have empowered democratic change, Radcliffe’s review of the global political climate forces readers to reconsider claims that connect social media and the growth of democracy. Do social media services actually have a causal relationship with the Arab Spring — the wave of insurrections across the Middle East that triggered subsequent shifts to democracy? Radcliffe takes issue with this apparently factual causal claim. But the careful reader will want to see how Radcliffe goes about challenging others’ claims to support his own claim of fact that “such optimism proved ill-founded.” Note how he asks questions to propel his argument (“What happened? Why haven’t social media made the world more democratic?”) and provides a claim of definition. Radcliffe’s definitional claim serves as an important rhetorical strategy for making an argument about what democracy is and the conditions that exist to support democratic principles. After all, how can others maintain that social media services such as Twitter and Facebook foster the spread of democracy if they have not defined a key term like “democracy”? This is especially true if a primary component of democracy is what Radcliffe describes as a “deliberative process.”

We invite you to examine Radcliffe’s primary claim and the evidence he uses to challenge a prevailing argument in the media and to support his own view that a true democracy “requires that citizens and their representatives discuss and debate what the government should or should not do, defending their views by appealing to shared principles and purposes.” Does he convincingly present his argument that others overstate the effect of social media because, at least implicitly, they fail to adequately define democracy and the democratic process? That is, do you accept his definition as the standard — or at least a plausible standard rooted in a factual claim — upon which to measure others’ arguments? Do social media services confer power? If so, who uses such power, and how do they use it? Finally, to what extent do social media services act as adequate forums for deliberation?

◼ Identify Claims of Value

A claim of fact is different from a claim of value, which expresses an evaluation of a problem or condition that has existed, exists, or will exist. Is a condition good or bad? Is it important or inconsequential?

For example, an argument that developing the wilderness in Alaska would irreversibly mar the beauty of the land indicates that the writer values the beauty of the land over the possible benefits of development. A claim of value presents a judgment, which is sometimes signaled by a value-laden word like ugly, beautiful, or immoral, but may also be conveyed more subtly by the writer’s tone and attitude.

Radcliffe makes a claim of value when he concludes by stating “with regard to political discussion, current use of social media favors affinity over engagement, expression over debate, silence over disagreement, dogmatism over compromise, and — toward opponents — disdain over respect.” This statement follows from Radcliffe’s initial observation that use of social media does not support the “reflective . . . will of ordinary people,” and from the evidence presents that social media services can be detrimental to the will of people when controlled by oppressive leaders. He writes, “When people who have strong political opinions avoid engaging opponents in reasoned debate but have them bolstered by social media followers, they tend to become more rigid in those views. . . . As a result, political partisans connected through social media tend to oppose legislative compromises on their pet issues . . . regardless of political realities or the common good.” Radcliffe underscores these observations in the final paragraph: “This, I believe, is largely why we have so far been unable to move beyond the use of social media as political weapons to make them instruments of deliberative democracy.” This may seem like a claim of fact, but Radcliffe’s claim is based on interpretation of the evidence he presents and the definition he establishes as the standard on which to judge whether a country is democratic. Whether you are persuaded by Radcliffe’s claim depends on the evidence and reasons he uses for support. We discuss the nature of evidence and what constitutes “good” reasons later in this chapter.

◼ Identify Claims of Policy

claim of policy is an argument for what should be the case, that a condition should exist. It is a call for change or a solution to a problem.

Two recent controversies on college campuses center on claims of policy. One has activists arguing that universities and colleges should have a policy that all workers on campus earn a living wage. The other has activists arguing that universities and colleges should have a policy that prevents them from investing in countries where the government ignores human rights. Claims of policy are often signaled by words like should and must: “For public universities to live up to their democratic mission, they must provide all their workers with a living wage.”

In “Ten Ways Social Media Can Improve Campaign Engagement and Reinvigorate American Democracy,” political scientist Darrell West describes how social media can “reinvigorate American democracy.” West develops an argument that echoes Dana Radcliffe’s claim that social media services do not foster or promote democratic practices, much less the kind of civic engagement that others (such as the author of the Forbes article Radcliffe cites) suggest. Although West makes a claim of fact when he observes that “Despite social networking’s track record for generating democratic engagement . . . it has proven difficult to sustain political interest and activism online over time and move electronic engagement from campaigns to governance,” he is most concerned with fostering policies that increase interest in the political process.

West describes a meeting of experts at the Brookings Institute, where participants share ways to encourage grassroots efforts to create change and govern at local, state, and national levels. One participant, political consultant Mindy Finn, argues that political advocacy “should take advantage of [social] networks to set the agenda and drive civic discussions,” explaining that advocacy should “involve everything from the questions that get asked during debates to the manner in which journalists cover the election.” Finn appears less interested in the deliberative process that preoccupies Radcliffe and embraces the role that social media can play in motivating citizenship and engagement. Another participant, professor of government Diana Owens, suggests that universities “[should] take on the responsibility as a matter of policy to increase civic education for political action.” A policy claim points readers to a set of actions they can take in the future, and West’s participants all declare policies they would like to see pursued.

Not all writers make their claims as explicitly as these authors do, and it is possible that claims of fact may seem like interpretive claims, as they are based on the inferences we draw from evidence. Thus, it is the writer’s task to make a distinction between a claim of fact and interpretation with sufficient evidence. But you should be able to identify the different types of claims. Moreover, you should keep in mind what the situation is and what kind of argument can best address what you see as a problem. Ask yourself: Does the situation involve a question of fact? Does the situation involve a question of value? Does the situation require a change in policy? Or is some combination at work?

Steps to Identifying Claims

1. Ask: Does the argument assert that a problem or condition has existed, exists, or will exist? Does the argument seek to establish that a definition is true and can serve as a standard for making relevant judgments? Does the argument ask you to accept the premise that one thing has caused another? If so, it’s claim of fact.

2. Ask: Does the argument express an evaluation of a problem or condition that has existed, exists, or will exist? If so, it’s a claim of value.

3. Ask: Does the argument call for change, and is it directed at some future action? If so, it’s a claim of policy.

A Practice Sequence: Identifying Claims

What follows is a series of claims. Identify each one as a claim of fact, value, or policy. Be prepared to justify your categorizations.

1. Taxing the use of fossil fuels will end the energy crisis.

2. We should reform the welfare system to ensure that people who receive support from the government also work.

3. Images of violence in the media create a culture of violence in schools.

4. The increase in homelessness is a deplorable situation that contradicts the whole idea of democracy.

5. Distributing property taxes more equitably is the one sure way to end poverty and illiteracy.

6. Individual votes don’t really count.

7. Despite the 20 percent increase in the number of females in the workforce over the past forty years, women are still not treated equitably.

8. Affirmative action is a policy that has outlived its usefulness.

9. There are a disproportionate number of black males in American prisons.

10. The media are biased, which means we cannot count on newspapers or television news for the truth.

ANALYZING ARGUMENTS

Analyzing an argument involves identifying the writer’s main and minor claims and then examining (1) the reasons and evidence given in support of each claim, (2) the writer’s concessions, and (3) the writer’s attempts to handle counterarguments.

◼ Analyze the Reasons Used to Support a Claim

Stating a claim is one thing; supporting that claim is another. As a critical reader, you need to evaluate whether a writer has provided good reasons to support his or her position. Specifically, you will need to decide whether the support for a claim is recent, relevant, reliable, and accurate. As a writer, you will need to use the same criteria when you support your claims.

Is the source recent?

 

Knowledgeable readers of your written arguments not only will be aware of classic studies that you should cite as “intellectual touchstones”; they will also expect you to cite recent evidence, evidence published within five years of when you are writing.

Of course, older research can be valuable. For example, in a paper about molecular biology, you might very well cite James Watson and Francis Crick’s groundbreaking 1953 study in which they describe the structure of DNA. That study is an intellectual touchstone that changed the life sciences in a fundamental way.

Or if you were writing about educational reform, you might very well mention E. D. Hirsch’s 1987 book Cultural Literacy. Hirsch’s book did not change the way people think about curricular reform as profoundly as Watson and Crick’s study changed the way scientists think about biology, but his term cultural literacy continues to serve as useful shorthand for a particular way of thinking about curricular reform that remains influential to this day.

Although citing Hirsch is an effective way to suggest you have studied the history of an educational problem, it will not convince your readers that there is a crisis in education today. To establish that, you would need to use as evidence studies published over the past few years to show, for example, that there has been a steady decline in test scores since Hirsch wrote his book. And you would need to support your claim that curricular reform is the one sure way to bring an end to illiteracy and poverty with data that are much more current than those available to Hirsch in the 1980s. No one would accept the judgment that our schools are in crisis if your most recent citation is decades old.

Is the source relevant?

 

Evidence that is relevant must have real bearing on your issue. It also depends greatly on what your readers expect. For example, suppose two of your friends complain that they were unable to sell their condominiums for the price they asked. You can claim there is a crisis in the housing market, but your argument won’t convince most readers if your only evidence is personal anecdote.

Such anecdotal evidence may alert you to a possible topic and help you connect with your readers, but you will need to test the relevance of your friends’ experience — Is it pertinent? Is it typical of a larger situation or condition? — if you want your readers to take your argument seriously. For example, you might scan real estate listings to see what the asking prices are for properties comparable to your friends’ properties. By comparing listings, you are defining the grounds for your argument. If your friends are disappointed that their one-bedroom condominiums sold for less than a three-bedroom condominium with deeded parking in the same neighborhood, it may well be that their expectations were too high.

In other words, if you aren’t comparing like things, your argument is going to be seriously flawed. If your friends’ definition of what constitutes a “reasonable price” differs dramatically from everyone else’s, their experience is probably irrelevant to the larger question of whether the local housing market is depressed.

Is the source reliable?

 

You also need to evaluate whether the data you use to support your argument are reliable. After all, some researchers present findings based on a very small sample of people that can also be rather selective.

For example, a researcher might argue that 67 percent of the people he cited believe that school and residential integration are important concerns. But how many people did this person interview? More important, who responded to the researcher’s questions? A reliable claim cannot be based on a few of the researcher’s friends.

Let’s return to the real estate example. You have confirmed that your friends listed their condominiums at prices that were not out of line with the market. Now what? You need to seek out reliable sources to continue testing your argument. For example, you might search the real estate or business section of your local newspaper to see if there are any recent stories about a softening of the market; and you might talk with several local real estate agents to get their opinions on the subject.

In consulting local newspapers and local agents, you are looking for authoritative sources against which to test your anecdotal evidence — the confirmation of experts who report on, study, evaluate, and have an informed opinion on local real estate. Local real estate agents are a source of expert testimony, firsthand confirmation of the information you have discovered. You would probably not want to rely on the testimony of a single real estate agent, who may have a bias; instead, talk with several agents to see if a consensus emerges.

Is the source accurate?

 

To determine the accuracy of a study that you want to use to support your argument, you have to do a little digging to find out who else has made a similar claim. For instance, if you want to cite authoritative research that compares the dropout rate for white students with the rate for students of color, you could look at research conducted by the Civil Rights Project. Of course, you don’t need to stop your search there. You could also check the resources available through the National Center for Education Statistics. You want to show your readers that you have done a relatively thorough search to make your argument as persuasive as possible.

The accuracy of statistics — factual information presented numerically or graphically (for example, in a pie or bar chart) — is difficult to verify. To a certain extent, then, their veracity has to be taken on faith. Often the best you can do is assure yourself that the source of your statistical information is authoritative and reliable — government and major research universities generally are “safe” sources — and that whoever is interpreting the statistical information is not distorting it.

Returning again to our real estate example, let’s say you’ve read a newspaper article that cites statistical information about the condition of the local real estate market (for example, the average price of property and volume of sales this year in comparison to last year). Presumably the author of the article is an expert, but he or she may be interpreting rather than simply reporting on the statistics.

To reassure yourself one way or the other, you may want to check the sources of the author’s statistics — go right to your source’s sources — which a responsible author will cite. That will allow you to look over the raw data and come to your own conclusions. A further step you could take would be to discuss the article with other experts — local real estate agents — to find out what they think of the article and the information it presents.

Now, let’s go back to Dana Radcliffe’s essay. How does he develop his assertion that social media services do not foster democratic principles of deliberation or help participants engage in serious dialogue about views different from their own? For that matter, how does Radcliffe arrive at the conclusion — or claim — that “social media appear unsuited to serve as forums of political deliberation?” Radcliffe first establishes what he sees as a plausible standard for defining deliberation as a key principle underlying a democratic society. He bolsters his argument by citing two well-known political philosophers, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, whose influential Democracy and Disagreement (Belknap, 1996) he quotes: “They point out that the demand for deliberation has been a familiar theme in the American constitutional tradition. It is integral to the ideal of republican government as the founders understood it. James Madison judged the design of political institutions in part by how well they furthered deliberation.” Importantly, Gutmann and Thompson cite former president and founding father James Madison to identify deliberation as a significant component of democracy and a standard with which to measure the extent to which a society promotes democratic principles.

Radcliffe then makes a series of observations about events that have occurred across the world since the Arab Spring. He points out that the Chinese government seems to allow “critics of public officials and policies to ‘vent’ online but tightly censors calls for collective action.” He also suggests that the Islamic State uses “social media to recruit disaffected Muslim youths from around the world,” and as you will note, he uses additional examples to illustrate the extent to which social media services have been “used as political weapons.” As readers, we may take for granted that Radcliffe’s observations are based in “fact,” but Radcliffe does not actually cite sources of his “data” to show that “the regime, organization, or group holding the power uses it against individuals, groups, or institutions whose interests or goals conflict with theirs.” You would be right to question the basis of such a claim.

In advancing his claim that social media does not support democratic engagement, Radcliffe relies on authoritative sources to explain the behavior of those who use social media. He cites a recent Pew Research Center report, which “offers evidence that people are much less willing to post their political views on social media when they believe their followers would disagree with them.” The Pew Research Center describes itself as a “nonpartisan, non-advocacy group” whose aim is to stimulate citizen involvement in community issues and conduct research on public opinion on social and political issues. Radcliffe also cites Daniel Gayo-Avello, who concludes that “when political discussions occur they are not rational and democratic deliberations . . . [because] political information in social media generally lacks quality and strong arguments [and] is usually incoherent and highly opinionated.” A professor of computer science at the University of Oviedo in Spain who conducts social media research, Gayo-Avello serves as a credible source of data to support Radcliffe’s claim. However, as critical readers, we should inquire into the nature of authors’ claims, the source of evidence, and the accuracy of the information authors rely on to advance their claims.

◼ Identify Concessions

Part of the strategy of developing a main claim supported with good reasons is to offer a concession, an acknowledgment that readers may not agree with every point the writer is making. A concession is a writer’s way of saying, “Okay, I can see that there may be another way of looking at the issue or another way to interpret the evidence used to support the argument I am making.”

For instance, you may not want your energy costs to go up, but after examining the reasons why it may be necessary to increase taxes on gasoline — to lower usage and conserve fossil fuels — you might concede that a tax increase on gasoline could be useful. The willingness to make concessions is valued in academic writing because it acknowledges both complexity and the importance of multiple perspectives. It also acknowledges the fact that information can always be interpreted in different ways.

Dana Radcliffe makes a concession when he acknowledges that not every reader will define democracy as he does, with an emphasis on deliberation. “Who, then, cares about promoting democratic deliberation?” He maintains that much is at stake for readers who identify with the value he attaches to deliberation as a core principle of democracy: “It is citizens and leaders who understand that democratic processes necessitate deliberative disagreement and, in the legislative process, negotiation and compromise.”

Often a writer will signal concessions with phrases like the following:

· “It is true that . . .”

· “I agree with X that Y is an important factor to consider.”

· “Some studies have convincingly shown that . . .”

Generally, the writer will then go on to address the concession, explaining how it needs to be modified or abandoned in the light of new evidence or the writer’s perspective on the issue.

◼ Identify Counterarguments

As the term suggests, a counterargument is an argument raised in response to another argument. You want to be aware of and acknowledge what your readers may object to in your argument. Anticipating readers’ objections is an important part of developing a conversational argument.

For example, if you were arguing in support of universal health care, you would have to acknowledge that the approach departs dramatically from the traditional role the federal government has played in providing health insurance. That is, most people’s access to health insurance has depended on their individual ability to afford and purchase this kind of insurance. You would have to anticipate how readers would respond to your proposal, especially readers who do not feel that the federal government should ever play a role in what has typically been an individual responsibility.

Anticipating readers’ objections demonstrates that you understand the complexity of the issue and are willing at least to entertain different and conflicting opinions.

In Dana Radcliffe’s essay on social media and democracy, he implicitly concedes that not all readers will care about promoting deliberative democracy; he acknowledges a possible counterargument by citing a Forbes article, the author of which contends that “the world is becoming more democratic and reflective of the will of ordinary people.” Of course, this is the point that Radcliffe takes issue with, one that clearly resonates for others. Radcliffe remains mindful of critical readers when he reiterates the counterargument that challenges his very definition of whether a nation promotes democracy. “To be sure, ‘deliberative democracy’ is an ideal to which existing democratic systems only roughly approximate. Nevertheless, the concept provides a plausible standard for evaluating democracies.” That is, he recognizes that his definition is the “ideal” and that few governments in practice actually reflect this ideal. But he is invested in such an idea and returns to his original premise: “Nevertheless, the concept provides a plausible standard for evaluating democracies. Moreover, it reminds us that the health of a democracy depends in large part on its fostering deliberation that leads to policies whose legitimacy most citizens accept.”

In an argument that is more conversational than confrontational, writers establish areas of common ground, both to convey different views that are understood and to acknowledge the conditions under which those different views are valid. Writers do this by making concessions and anticipating and responding to counterarguments.

This conversational approach is what many people call a Rogerian approach to argument, based on psychologist Carl Rogers’s approach to psychotherapy. The objective of a Rogerian strategy is to reduce listeners’ sense of threat so that they are open to alternatives. For academic writers, it involves four steps:

1. Conveying to readers that their different views are understood.

2. Acknowledging conditions under which readers’ views are valid.

3. Helping readers see that the writer shares common ground with them.

4. Creating mutually acceptable solutions to agreed-on problems.

The structure of an argument, according to the Rogerian approach, grows out of the give-and-take of conversation between two people and the topic under discussion. In a written conversation, the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation takes the form of anticipating readers’ counterarguments and uses language that is both empathetic and respectful, to put the readers at ease.

AN ANNOTATED STUDENT ARGUMENT

We have annotated the following essay to show the variety of claims the student writer uses, as well as some of the other argumentative moves he performs. The assignment was to write an argument out of personal experience and observation about the cultural impact of a technological innovation. Marques Camp chose to write about the Kindle, an electronic reading device developed by the online retailer Amazon that allows users to download books for a fee. The user cannot share the download electronically with other users. Camp touches on a number of issues reflected in his claims.

As you read the essay, imagine how you would respond to his various claims. Which do you agree with, which do you disagree with, and why? What evidence would you present to support or counter his claims? Do you detect a main claim? Do you think his overall essay develops and supports it?

An essay with annotations.

The essay reads as follows:

“Marques Camp, Professor Fells, English 1020, January 28, 20 —

The End of the World May Be Nigh, and It’s the Kindle’s Fault

“Libraries will in the end become cities.”

— Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German polymath”

The first paragraph reads, “The future of written human history will come, as they will have us believe, in the form of the Amazon Kindle, all 10.2 ounces of it, all 2 GB and 532 MHz of it, all 240,000+ titles of it, ready to change the way people read, ready to revolutionize the way people see the world.”

The annotation for this paragraph reads, “The student presents a claim of fact that others have made.”

The second paragraph reads, “The Kindle is a signpost for our times, the final checkpoint in our long and adventurous journey from the world of printed paper to the twenty-first-century world of digitalization. We first saw this paradigm shift with newspapers, where weekly columns were taken over by daily blog posts, where 48-point sans-serif headlines transformed into 12-point Web links. We then moved on into television, where Must-See TV was replaced with On-Demand TV, where consumers no longer sat around in the living room with their families during prime time but rather watched the latest episode of their favorite show commercial-free from the comfortable and convenient confines of their laptop, able to fastforward, rewind, and pause with a delightful and devilish sense of programming omnipotence. We are now seeing it, slowly but surely, slay the giant that we never thought could be slain: the world of books.”

The annotation pointing to the sentence, “We first saw this paradigm shift with newspapers, where weekly columns were taken over by daily blog posts, where 48-point sans-serif headlines transformed into 12-point Web links” reads, “He lays the basis for a counterargument by questioning whether this is a real threat at all, citing some technological precedents.”

The third paragraph reads, Contrary to popular belief, easier access to a wider quantity of literature is not a universal revolution. The Kindle speaks to the world that measures quantity by the number of cable television channels it has, speed by the connectivity of its wireless networks, and distance by the number of miles a family travels for vacation. Yes, the Kindle is the new paradigm for universal access and literary connectivity. But it is much like a college degree in the sense that it is merely a gateway to a wealth of opportunity. The problem, however, is gaining access to this gateway in the first place.”

The annotation for this paragraph reads, “In this paragraph, he makes a claim of fact about unequal access to technological innovation and offers a concession to what many see as the value of the Kindle.”

A page with annotations...

The first paragraph reads, “Books often pass from hand to hand, from friend to friend, from generation to generation, many times with the mutual understanding that remuneration is not necessary — merely the promise of hope that the new reader is as touched and enlightened by the book as the previous one. This transfer serves more than a utilitarian function; symbolically, it represents the passage of hope, of knowledge, of responsibility.”

The annotation for the sentence, “This transfer serves more than a utilitarian function; symbolically, it represents the passage of hope, of knowledge, of responsibility” reads, “He supports his claim of fact with evidence based on experience: that sharing books provides something technology cannot offer.”

The second paragraph reads, “The book, in many cases, represents the only sort of hope for the poorest among us, the great equalizer in a world full of financial and intellectual capital and highly concentrated access to this capital. The wonderful quality of the book is that its intellectual value is very rarely proportional to its financial value; people often consider their most valuable book to be one they happened to pick up one day for free.

The annotation for the sentence “The book, in many cases, represents the only sort of hope for the poorest among us, the great equalizer in a world full of financial and intellectual capital and highly concentrated access to this capital” reads, “Evidence from observation: not everyone has access to new technologies, but people will always have access to ¬books.”

The third paragraph reads, “The proliferation of the Kindle technology, however, will result in a wider disconnect between the elite and the non-elite — as the old saying goes, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. Unfortunately for the poor, this is no financial disconnect — this is a widening of the gap in the world of ideas. And this is, perhaps, the most dangerous gap of all.”

The annotation for the sentence “The proliferation of the Kindle technology, however, will result in a wider disconnect between the elite and the non-elite — as the old saying goes, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer” reads, “An evaluative claim — that the widening gap between rich and poor is dangerous — adds another layer to the argument.”

The fourth paragraph reads, “The Kindle Revolution, ironically, may end up contributing to the very disease that is antithetical to its implied function: illiteracy. Make no mistake, the Kindle was not designed with the poor in mind. For those in most need of the printed word, for those who are the most vulnerable victims of the illiteracy threat, the $359 Kindle offers little in the way of hope. One book for a poor person is all he or she needs to be inspired and change the world; with the Kindle, that one book is consolidated and digitized, transformed from a tangible piece of hope and the future into a mere collection of words in the theoretically infinite dimension of cyberspace. A “book” on the Kindle is a book wedged among many other books, separated by nothing more than title, devoid of essence, devoid of uniqueness, devoid of personality, devoid of its unique position in space — precisely what makes a book a “book,” as opposed to a mere collection of words. It is no longer singular, no longer serendipitous, no longer distinguishable.”

The annotation for the sentences “The Kindle Revolution, ironically, may end up contributing to the very disease that is antithetical to its implied function: illiteracy. Make no mistake, the Kindle was not designed with the poor in mind. For those in most need of the printed word, for those who are the most vulnerable victims of the illiteracy threat, the $359 Kindle offers little in the way of hope. One book for a poor person is all he or she needs to be inspired and change the world; with the Kindle, that one book is consolidated and digitized” reads, “A further evaluative claim — that new technological devices offer little hope to “victims” of illiteracy — is followed by a claim of fact that books inspire people to create change in the¬ world.”

The fifth paragraph reads, “The e-book cannot, like a bound book, pass through multiple hands and eventually settle itself on the right person, ready”

A page with annotations...

The first paragraph reads, “to be unleashed as a tool to change the world. Due to the restrictions on sharing and reselling e-books with the Kindle, the very nature of reading books transforms from highly communal to individualistic, from highly active to somewhat passive. The Kindle will lead to the mystification of books, wherein they become less unique capsules of thoughts and ideas and experiences and more utility-oriented modes of information-giving. What many Kindle advocates fail to realize is that oftentimes, the transformative quality of books resides less in the actual words comprising the book and more in the actual experience of reading.”

The annotation making the sentence, “Due to the restrictions on sharing and reselling e-books with the Kindle, the very nature of reading books transforms from highly communal to individualistic, from highly active to somewhat passive” reads, “An evaluative claim in which the author observes that technology can make reading passive. Then a claim of fact: that the experience of reading can be transformative.”

The second paragraph reads, “There is also something to be said for the utter corporeality of books that lies at the heart of Leibniz’s metaphor. Libraries are physical testaments to all that we have learned and recorded during human history. The sheer size of libraries, the sheer number of volumes residing in them, tell us, in a spatial sense, of all the theoretical knowledge we have accumulated in the course of our existence, and all the power we have to further shape and define the world we live in. The Kindle and other digital literary technologies are threatening the very connection between the world of ideas and the material world, threatening to take our literal measures of progress and hide them away in the vast database of words and ideas, available only to those with $359 to spare and a credit card for further purchases.”

The annotation marking the sentence, “The Kindle and other digital literary technologies are threatening the very connection between the world of ideas and the material world” reads, “The student offers a final evaluative claim, observing that the Kindle threatens to mask the relationship between ideas and the world.”

The third paragraph reads, “If libraries will indeed become cities, then we need to carefully begin to lay the foundations, book on top of book on top of book, and we are going to have to ensure that we have enough manpower to do it.”

The annotation for this paragraph reads, “His concluding claim falls just short of making a proposal — but he does suggest that those in positions of power must ensure the proliferation of ¬books.”

Steps to Analyzing an Argument

1. Identify the type of claim. Is it a claim of fact? Value? Policy?

2. Analyze the reasons used to support the claim. Are they recent? Relevant? Reliable? Accurate?

3. Identify concessions. Is there another argument that even the author acknowledges is legitimate?

4. Identify counterarguments. What arguments contradict or challenge the author’s position?

A Practice Sequence: Analyzing an Argument

Use the criteria in the “Steps to Analyzing an Argument” box to analyze the following blog post by Susan D. Blum. What types of claim does she advance? What seems to be her main claim? Do you find her reasons recent, relevant, reliable, and accurate? What sort of concessions does she make? What counterarguments would you raise?

SUSAN D. BLUM

The United States of (Non)Reading: The End of Civilization or a New Era?

Susan D. Blum is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame whose wide areas of professional interest and expertise include Asian studies and education. She has written or edited many publications, including Portraits of “Primitives”: Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Nation (2001), My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture (2009), and Making Sense of Language: Readings in Culture and Communication (2009; 2013). She also writes the Learning versus Schooling blog for the Huffington Post, where this essay was posted on October 8, 2013.

Just the other day one of my undergraduate assistants reported a friend’s boast that he had not read anything for school since fifth grade. A student at an excellent university, successful, “clever,” “smart,” he can write papers, take exams, participate in class or online discussions. Why would he have to read?

Students sometimes don’t buy the class books. Professors are shocked.

Several years ago a student told me that she regarded all assigned reading as “recommended,” even if the professors labeled it “required.” Were professors so dumb that they didn’t know that?

The idea of assigned reading, as the core activity of college students, is old. Students don’t see it as central; faculty do.

And though I used to, and sometimes still do, spend a lot of energy lamenting this, by taking a broader view of the nature of reading and writing, I have come to understand it and even to some extent accept it.

Student avoidance of reading is not an entirely new problem. When I was in graduate school, in the 1980s, one of my most indelible memories was of a new classmate, straight out of a first-rate college, complaining in our anthropology theory class that we had to keep finding out what other people thought. When was it time for us to convey our viewpoints? Why all that reading?

Some college course evaluations ask students what percentage of the reading they did. Some report they did as much as 90 percent. Some as little as 25 percent.

In a systematic study of college students’ reading, Kylie Baier and four colleagues reported that students mostly (40 percent) read for exams. Almost 19 percent don’t read for class. In terms of time, 94 percent of students spend less than two hours on any given reading for class; 62 percent spend less than an hour. Thirty-two percent believe they could get an A without reading; 89 percent believe they could get at least a C.

Among many other educational crises, there is a perceived crisis given that “students are increasingly reading less and less.”

When faculty enter new institutions, they often ask colleagues: How much reading should I assign? Some departments offer guidelines about the number of pages: Assign twenty-five pages for each meeting of first-year classes, but no more than one hundred pages a week for any course. This has always struck me as strange, given that a page of a novel and a page of a double-column textbook have completely different amounts of text, and take different kinds of attention and time. In response to this faculty challenge, Steve Volk — named the Carnegie Professor of the Year in 2011, so he knows something about teaching — wrote on the Web site of Oberlin College’s Center for Teaching Innovation and Excellence that there is no magic formula for numbers of pages. He suggests instead that faculty consider “What do you want the reading to do?”

But it is not only college teachers who worry about how much people are reading. There is a widespread belief that Americans in general read less and less. This perception builds on public conversations about the lack of reading. In 2007 a National Endowment for the Arts study concluded that adults’ reading habits were in severe decline. Only 57 percent of adults read a book voluntarily in 2002, down from 61 percent in 1992.

This was supposed to have all sorts of terrible consequences: educational, of course, but also economic, social, moral, you name it.

Reversing the cup-half-empty conclusion, a 2013 study showed that more than half read books for pleasure — just not what the NEA defines (or would if the Government were functioning) as “literature.”

And the Pew interpretation was that if reading for work and school is added to “voluntary reading,” then almost all people read “books” at some point during the year: 79 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds, and 90 percent of 16 to 17 year-olds.

It is undeniable that people are reading (looking at) writing all the time. It may not be in physical books, however. And just this week, USA Today argued that digital devices increase book reading (on the devices).

David Carr wrote in 2008 about the decline in attention — not only in our students. Attention spans, focus, mindfulness . . . all these are shrinking. Technology plays a role in this, as many of us spend much of our lives looking at short items. The Onion, the humor website, puts most of its efforts into its headlines. Blogs should be at most one thousand words, but three hundred is better. (This one is too long.)

So if students are sipping text constantly on their devices, and suddenly they are asked to consume what sounds like an insurmountable mountain of pages in some other form — and for what!? — they are likely to avoid it entirely.

“Flipping the classroom” has attempted to seek some kind of accountability from students for their reading, so that they have to engage in one way or another with their material prior to assembling for the precious moment of face-to-face interaction. This requires reading — but reading with a goal. Students often like to do that, as a kind of scavenger hunt for what is useful and important. Just having them read for background ideas seems to be fading.

Actually, I have stopped worrying constantly about this. Students are reading. The public is reading. They may not sit for hours, still and attentive, and focus on one item. They may confuse their facts. They may miss a complex argument.

Don’t misunderstand. I worship reading. When I travel for three days, in addition to all my devices I bring six books and five (print) magazines. Yet I cannot concentrate the way I used to. So those less devoted. . . . Should we cut them off from the world, isolate them in soundproof rooms with no WiFi, and force them to read a book?

Writing has evolved, and will evolve. And with it reading changes. From clay tablets designed to record debts to bronze proclamations of kings and emperors, from bamboo strips recording rituals to complex philosophical arguments on paper, from paintings for the royal afterlife to paperback novels, from stone tablets proclaiming a new moral code to infinitesimal elements on a shiny handheld device — from its origins, writing has transformed, and will continue to change. It is not entirely that the medium is the message, but the medium affects the message. Since humans are the ones doing the writing, we get the writing that suits our purposes.

We are all getting a front-row seat to a sudden change in medium, and therefore in writing and reading. What a quick and shocking ride this is!

Read all about it!

ANALYZING AND COMPARING ARGUMENTS

As an academic writer, you will often need to compare disparate claims and evidence from multiple arguments addressing the same topic. Rarely, however, will those arguments be simplistic pro/con pairs meant to represent two opposing sides to an issue. Certainly the news media thrive on such black-and-white conflict, but academic writers seek greater complexity and do not expect to find simple answers. Analyzing and comparing essays on the same topic or issue will often reveal the ways writers work with similar evidence to come up with different, and not necessarily opposed, arguments.

The next two selections are arguments about grade inflation. Both are brief, and we recommend you read through them as a prelude to the activity in analyzing and comparing arguments that follows them. As you read, try to note their claims, the reasons used to support them, concessions, and counterarguments.

STUART ROJSTACZER

Grade Inflation Gone Wild

A former professor of geophysics at Duke University with a PhD in applied earth sciences, Stuart Rojstaczer has written or coauthored many geological studies in his career as a scientist. He has also published a book, Gone for Good: Tales of University Life after the Golden Age (1999), and numerous articles on higher education and grading. He is the creator of gradeinflation.com, where he posts a variety of charts and graphs chronicling his data about grade inflation. This op-ed piece appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on March 24, 2009.

About six years ago, I was sitting in the student union of a small liberal arts college when I saw a graph on the cover of the student newspaper that showed the history of grades given at that institution in the past 30 years.

Grades were up. Way up.

I’m a scientist by training and I love numbers. So when I looked at that graph, I wondered, “How many colleges and universities have data like this that I can find?” The answer is that a lot of schools have data like this hidden somewhere. Back then, I found more than 80 colleges and universities with data on grades, mostly by poking around the Web. Then I created a website (gradeinflation.com) so that others could find this data. I learned that grades started to shoot up nationwide in the 1960s, leveled off in the 1970s, and then started rising again in the 1980s. Private schools had much higher grades than public schools, but virtually everyone was experiencing grade inflation.

What about today?

Grades continue to go up regardless of the quality of education. At a time when many are raising questions about the quality of U.S. higher education, the average GPA at public schools is 3.0, with many flagship state schools having average GPAs higher than 3.2. At a private college, the average is now 3.3. At some schools, it tops 3.5 and even 3.6. “A” is average at those schools! At elite Brown University, two-thirds of all letter grades given are now A’s.

These changes in grading have had a profound influence on college life and learning. When students walk into a classroom knowing that they can go through the motions and get a B+ or better, that’s what they tend to do, give minimal effort. Our college classrooms are filled with students who do not prepare for class. Many study less than 10 hours a week — that’s less than half the hours they spent studying 40 years ago. Paradoxically, students are spending more and more money for an education that seems to deliver less and less content.

With so few hours filled with learning, boredom sets in and students have to find something to pass the time. Instead of learning, they drink. A recent survey of more than 30,000 first-year students across the country showed that nearly half were spending more hours drinking than they were studying. If we continue along this path, we’ll end up with a generation of poorly educated college graduates who have used their four years principally to develop an addiction to alcohol.

There are many who say that grade inflation is a complicated issue with no easy fix. But there are solutions. At about the same time that I started to collect data on rising grades, Princeton University began to actually do something about its grade-inflation problem. Its guidelines have the effect of now limiting A’s on average to 35 percent of students in a class. Those guidelines have worked. Grades are going back down at Princeton and academic rigor is making a comeback. A similar successful effort has taken place at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. And through a concerted effort on the part of faculty and leadership, grades at Reed College in Oregon have stayed essentially constant for 20 years.

Princeton, Wellesley, and Reed provide evidence that the effort to keep grade inflation in check is not impossible. This effort takes two major steps. First, school officials must admit that there is a problem. Then they must implement policies or guidelines that truly restore excellence.

I asked Dean Nancy Malkiel at Princeton why so few schools seem to be following Princeton’s lead. “Because it’s hard work,” she answered. “Because you have to persuade the faculty that it’s important to do the work.”

Making a switch will take hard work, but the effort is worthwhile. The alternative is a student body that barely studies and drinks out of boredom. That’s not acceptable. Colleges and universities must roll up their sleeves, bring down inflated grades, and encourage real learning. It’s not an impossible task. There are successful examples that can be followed. I’m looking forward to the day when we can return to being proud of the education that our nation’s colleges and universities provide.

PHIL PRIMACK

Doesn’t Anybody Get a C Anymore?

Phil Primack is a journalist, editor, and policy analyst who teaches journalism at Tufts University, where he is a senior fellow at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service. His articles have appeared in many regional and national publications, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Columbia Journalism Review. The following piece appeared in the Boston Globe on October 5, 2008.

The student deserved a B-minus. Maybe even a C-plus, I had decided. One paper was especially weak; another was late. But then I began to rationalize. The student had been generally prepared and contributed to class discussion, so I relented and gave what I thought was a very generous B. At least I wouldn’t get a complaint about this grade, I figured. Then came the e-mail.

Why such a “low grade,” the indignant student wrote.

“Low grade”? Back when I attended Tufts in the late 1960s, a B in certain courses was something I could only dream about. But grade inflation, the steady rise in grade point averages that began in the 1960s, now leaves many students regarding even the once-acceptable B — which has always stood for “good” — as a transcript wrecker, and a C — that is, “average” — as unmitigated disaster. More and more academic leaders may lament grade inflation, but precious few have been willing to act against it, leaving their professors all alone in the minefield between giving marks that reflect true merit and facing the wrath of students for whom entitlement begins with the letter A.

Grade inflation “is a huge problem,” says former U.S. senator Hank Brown, who tried to make it a priority issue as president of the University of Colorado in 2006. “Under the current system at a lot of schools, there is no way to recognize the difference between an outstanding job and a good job. Grade inflation hides laziness on the part of the students, and as long as it exists, even faculty who want to do a good job [in grading] don’t feel they can.”

That’s because many professors fear that “tough grading” will trigger poor student evaluations or worse, which in turn can jeopardize the academic career track. “In my early years, students would say they liked my class, but the grades were low and the work level high,” says retired Duke University professor Stuart Rojstaczer. “I had to get with the program and reduce my own expectations of workload and increase grades in order to have students leave my class with a positive impression to give to other students so they would attend [next year]. I was teaching worse, but the student response was much more positive.”

Harvard University is the poster campus for academic prestige — and for grade inflation, even though some of its top officials have warned about grade creep. About 15 percent of Harvard students got a B-plus or better in 1950, according to one study. In 2007, more than half of all Harvard grades were in the A range. Harvard declined to release more current data or officially comment for this article. At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the average GPA in 2007 was 3.19 (on a four-point scale), up from 3.02 a decade earlier. That “modest increase” simply reflects better students, UMass spokesman Ed Blaguszewski says in an e-mail. “Since our students have been increasingly well-prepared . . . it makes sense that their UMass grades have crept up. Essentially, the profile of the population has changed over time, so we don’t consider this to be grade inflation.”

That’s certainly the most common argument to explain away grade inflation — smarter students naturally get higher grades. But is it that simple? Privately, many faculty members and administrators say colleges are unwilling to challenge and possibly offend students and their hovering, tuition-paying parents with some tough grade love. And without institutional backing, individual faculty members simply yield to whining students.

But not everywhere. The most cited — and extreme — case of taking on grade inflation is at Princeton University, which in 2004 directed that A’s account for less than 35 percent of undergraduate course grades. From 2004 to 2007, A’s (A-plus, A, A-minus) accounted for 40.6 percent of undergraduate course grades, down from 47 percent in the period 2001 to 2004.

Closer to home, Wellesley College calls for the average grade in basic undergraduate courses to be no higher than a B-plus (3.33 GPA). “It’s not that we’re trying to get grades down, but we’re trying to get grades to mean something,” says associate dean of the college Adele Wolfson, who teaches chemistry. Wellesley’s GPA, which stood at 3.47 in 2002 and was 3.4 when the policy was implemented two years later, fell to 3.3 this year, mainly because of more B grades and fewer A’s. “The A has really become the mark of excellence,” she says, “which is what it should be.”

The problem, says Rojstaczer, is that such policies are the exceptions, and that grade inflation will be reduced only through consistent prodding and action by top officials. “In truth, some university leaders are embarrassed that grading is so lax, but they are loath to make any changes,” he says in an e-mail. “Grade inflation in academia is like the alcoholic brother you pretend is doing just fine. When someone calls your brother a drunk, you get angry and defend him, although privately you worry. That’s where we are with grade inflation: public denial and private concern.”

A Practice Sequence: Analyzing and Comparing Arguments

1. To practice these strategies, first break up into small groups to discuss four different concerns surrounding grade inflation:

Group 1: Define what you think grade inflation is.

Group 2: Discuss whether you think grade inflation is a problem at the university or college you attend. What evidence can you provide to suggest that it is or is not a problem?

Group 3: Why should students or faculty be concerned with grade inflation? What’s at stake?

Group 4: How would you respond if the administration at your university or college decided to limit the number of A’s that faculty could give students?

Reassemble as a class and briefly report on the discussions.

2. Analyze Stuart Rojstaczer’s argument in “Grade Inflation Gone Wild,” addressing the following questions:

· What evidence does Rojstaczer use to indicate that there is a problem?

· How would you characterize this evidence (for example, scientific, anecdotal), and to what extent are you persuaded by the evidence he provides to suggest that grade inflation has a profound effect on “life and learning”?

· To what extent does he persuade you that a change in policy is necessary or that such a change would make a difference?

3. Now compare Phil Primack’s and Stuart Rojstaczer’s strategies for developing an argument.

· How does Primack establish that there is a problem? To what extent is his approach as persuasive as Rojstaczer’s?

· What strategies would you identify in either argument as strategies that you might employ to develop your own argument?

· To what extent are you persuaded by the counterargument that Primack introduces?

· What do you think Primack wants you to do or think about in his analysis?

· In the end, does Primack add anything to your understanding of the problem of whether your college or university should introduce a policy to limit grade inflation?

4. As an alternative assignment, write a three-page essay in which you compare the arguments student Marques Camp and Professor Susan D. Blum make about the state of reading today. Consider their main claims and how they support them. Explain which argument you find more persuasive, and why. Feel free to draw on your own experience and make use of personal anecdotes to make your case.