English

3 Criteria of Rebuttal: 1. The opposing viewpoint has to be presented accurately and clearly. 2. The reasons and evidence used to undermine the opposing viewpoint must be accurate and logical. 3. The rebuttal must be presented without personal attack or malice and in a courteous manner 3 Types of Refutation: 1) refutation through evidence, (2) refutation through logic, and (3) refutation through exposing the discrepancies of opposing argument. Practice: Instructions​: Read each of the examples with a partner. Identify whether or not you think it is a rebuttal or refutation.

1) Those who argue that school uniforms would create more school unity and pride have a compelling argument. However, school uniforms also undermine personal creativity and individuality for students, which should be valued.

2) My friend here claimed that there is no need to worry about job displacement due to rising automation and artificial intelligence technologies because those in the field predict that there will be a boom of new and better jobs created as those automation and technologies emerge. In fact, the opposite is currently happening. There are more jobs being lost than there are new emerging jobs in current industries. Those new jobs that are being created are either out of reach for the displaced worker, or they are of an unrelated field, not to mention that most of the new jobs offer less salary and less health/retirement benefits.

3) My opponent makes a strong argument that senior citizens should not have to pay taxes. Yet, he does not address the fact that some senior citizens are more capable of sharing the tax burden than young, working families. He makes no provision in his plan for a needs-based exemption from paying taxes.

4) As long as schools remain segregated, colleges will continue to remain both separate and unequal. By Oklahoma’s own reckoning, the government is currently spending five times more for the education of a white child than a colored child. That means more books for that child than the other child. I say that’s a shame, but my opponent thinks because of racial hatred, blacks and whites aren’t ready to go to school together. He says that today is not the day for whites and blacks to share the same schools, to have the same rights. Well could you kindly when that day is going to come? Is it going to come tomorrow? Should it be next year? Ten or twenty years? One-hundred years?

Never? No, the time to deal with injustice and inequality has always been and will always be now, now, now!

5) While it is true that the creation of ATM machines resulted in less teller jobs in banking locations, the number of teller jobs actually increased because the number of bank locations increased all around. Tellers could focus more on customer service and more socially complex tasks rather than boring simplistic transactions.

6) While it’s true that W.E.B. Dubois did say that whites and blacks were not ready to go to the same schools. Dubois himself is a product of success because he joined a white school, Harvard. It’s because he felt the white’s racism and hatred that he believed we weren’t, but without a proper education at the best schools, blacks will not be able to advance the way they should. There’s no reason to keep anyone from advancing because of potential racism.