Essay
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writing_argumentative_essays_ch.3.docxWRITING ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAYS
Not long ago, the Educational Testing Service revamped the infamous Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), which many universities use when determining whether to admit an applicant. The most significant change was to have test takers write an argumentative essay. This change in the SAT shows the importance the educators place on the ability to write this type of essay. That’s because writing an argumentative essay is doing nothing other than thinking critically—and leaving a paper trail for others to follow. This isn’t a book on writing, but writing an argumentative essay is so closely related to thinking critically that we would like to take the opportunity to offer our recommendations. We know professors who have retired because they could not bear to read another student essay. As a result, we offer our two bits’ worth here in hopes of continuing to see familiar faces.
As we said back on page 65, an argumentative essay generally has four components:
A statement of the issue
A statement of one’s position on that issue
Arguments that support one’s position
Rebuttals of arguments that support contrary positions
Ideally, your essay should begin with an introduction to the issue that demonstrates that the issue is important or interesting. This is not always easy, but even when you are not excited about the subject yourself, it is still good practice to try to make your reader interested. Your statement of the issue should be fair; that is, don’t try to state the issue in such a way that your position on it is obviously the only correct one. This can make your reader suspicious; the burden of convincing him or her will come later, when you give your arguments.
Your position on the issue should be clear. Try to be brief. If you have stated the issue clearly, it should be a simple matter to identify your position.
Your arguments in support of your position also should be as succinct as you can make them, but it is much more important to be clear than to be brief. After all, this is the heart of your essay. The reasons you cite should be clearly relevant, and they should be either clearly reliable or backed up by further arguments. Much of the rest of this book is devoted to how this is done; hang in there.
If there are well-known arguments for the other side of the issue, you should acknowledge them and offer some reason to believe that they are unconvincing. You can do this either by attacking the premises that are commonly given or by trying to show that those premises do not actually support the opposing conclusion. More on these topics later, too.
Following are some more detailed hints that might be helpful in planning and writing your argumentative essay:
1. Focus. Make clear at the outset what issue you intend to address and what your position on the issue will be. However, nothing is quite so boring as starting off with the words “In this essay, I will argue that X, Y, and Z,” and then going on to itemize everything you are about to say, and at the end concluding with the words “In this essay, I argued that X, Y, and Z.” As a matter of style, you should let the reader know what to expect without using trite phrases and without going on at length. However, you should try to find an engaging way to state your position. For example, instead of “In this essay, I will discuss the rights of animals to inherit property from their masters,” you might begin, “Could your inheritance wind up belonging to your mother’s cat?”
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2. Stick to the issue. All points you make in an essay should be connected to the issue under discussion and should always either (a) support, illustrate, explain, clarify, elaborate on, or emphasize your position on the issue or (b) serve as responses to anticipated objections. Rid the essay of irrelevancies and dangling thoughts.
3. Arrange the components of the essay in a logical sequence. This is just common sense. Make a point before you clarify it, for example, not the other way around.
When supporting your points, bring in examples, clarification, and the like in such a way that a reader knows what in the world you are doing. A reader should be able to discern the relationship between any given sentence and your ultimate objective, and he or she should be able to move from sentence to sentence and from paragraph to paragraph without getting lost or confused. If a reader cannot outline your essay with ease, you have not properly sequenced your material. Your essay might be fine as a piece of French philosophy, but it would not pass as an argumentative essay.
4. Be complete. Accomplish what you set out to accomplish, support your position adequately, and anticipate and respond to possible objections. Keep in mind that many issues are too large to be treated exhaustively in a single essay. The key to being complete is to define the issue sharply enough that you can be complete. Thus, the more limited your topic, the easier it is to be complete in covering it.
Also, be sure there is closure at every level. Sentences should be complete, paragraphs should be unified as wholes (and usually each should stick to a single point), and the essay should reach a conclusion. Incidentally, reaching a conclusion and summarizing are not the same thing. Short essays do not require summaries.
Good Writing Practices
Understanding the four principles just mentioned is one thing, but actually employing them may be more difficult. Fortunately, there are five practices that a writer can follow to improve the organization of an essay and to help avoid other problems. We offer the following merely as a set of recommendations within the broader scope of thinking critically in writing.
I’m for abolishing and doing away with redundancy.
—J.Curtis McKay, of the Wisconsin State Elections Board (reported by Ross and Petras)
We ourselves are also for that too.
1.At some stage after the first draft, outline what you have written. Then, make certain the outline is logical and that every sentence in the essay fits into the outline as it should. Some writers create an informal outline before they begin, but many do not. Our advice: Just identify the issue and your position on it, and start writing by stating them both.
Incidentally, for most people, the hardest sentence to write is the first one. H. L. Mencken once said, “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank piece of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” We have better advice: Just begin using your keyboard. Say anything. You can always throw away what you write at first, but just the act of writing will help you get started. Eventually, you’ll say something relevant to your topic and then you’re off and running.
2.Revise your work. Revising is the secret to good writing. Even major-league writers revise what they write, and they revise continuously. Unless you are more gifted than the very best professional writers, revise, revise, revise. Don’t think in terms of two or three drafts. Think in terms of innumerable drafts.
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3.Have someone else read your essay and offer criticisms of it. Revise as required.
4.If you have trouble with grammar or punctuation, reading your essay out loud may help you detect problems your eyes have missed.
5.After you are completely satisfied with the essay, put it aside. Then, come back to it later for still further revisions.
Essay Types to Avoid
Seasoned instructors know that the first batch of essays they get from a class will include samples of each of the following types. We recommend avoiding these mistakes:
■The Windy Preamble. Writers of this type of essay avoid getting to the issue and instead go on at length with introductory remarks, often about how important the issue is, how it has troubled thinkers for centuries, how opinions on the issue are many and various, and so on, and so on. Anything you write that smacks of “When in the course of human events . . . “ should go into the trash can immediately.
■The Stream-of-Consciousness Ramble. This type of essay results when writers make no attempt to organize their thoughts and simply spew them out in the order in which they come to mind.
■The Knee-Jerk Reaction. In this type of essay, writers record their first reaction to an issue without considering the issue in any depth or detail. It always shows.
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■The Glancing Blow. In this type of essay, writers address an issue obliquely. If they are supposed to evaluate the health benefits of bicycling, they will bury the topic in an essay on the history of cycling; if they are supposed to address the history of cycling, they will talk about the benefits of riding bicycles throughout history.
■Let the Reader Do the Work. Writers of this type of essay expect the reader to follow them through non sequiturs, abrupt shifts in direction, and irrelevant sidetracks.
And While We’re on the Subject of Writing
Don’t forget these rules of good style:
1.Avoid clichés like the plague.
2.Be more or less specific.
3.NEVER generalize.
4.The passive voice is to be ignored.
5.Never, ever be redundant.
6.Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
7.Make sure verbs agrees with their subjects.
8.Why use rhetorical questions?
9.Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
10.Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
11.And it’s usually a bad idea to start a sentence with a conjunction.
This list has been making the rounds on the Internet.
Persuasive Writing
The primary aim of argumentation and the argumentative essay is to support a position on an issue. Good writers, however, write for an audience and hope their audience will find what they write persuasive. If you are writing for an audience of people who think critically, it is helpful to adhere to these principles:
Confine your discussion of an opponent’s point of view to issues rather than personal considerations.
When rebutting an opposing viewpoint, avoid being strident or insulting. Don’t call opposing arguments absurd or ridiculous.
If an opponent’s argument is good, concede that it is good.
If space or time is limited, be sure to concentrate on the most important
considerations. Don’t become obsessive about refuting every last criticism of your position.
Present your strongest arguments first.
There is nothing wrong with trying to make a persuasive case for your position. However, in this book we place more emphasis on making and recognizing good arguments than on simply devising effective techniques of persuasion. Some people can be persuaded by poor arguments and doubtful claims, and an argumentative essay can be effective as a piece of propaganda even when it is a rational and critical failure. One of the most difficult things you are called upon to do as a critical thinker is to construct and evaluate claims and arguments independently of their power to win a following. The remainder of this book—after a section on writing and diversity—is devoted to this task.
Writing in a Diverse Society
In closing, it seems appropriate to mention how important it is to avoid writing in a manner that reinforces questionable assumptions and attitudes about people’s gender, ethnic background, religion, sexual orientation, physical ability or disability, or other characteristics. This isn’t just a matter of ethics; it is a matter of clarity and good sense. Careless word choices relative to such characteristics not only are imprecise and inaccurate but also may be viewed as biased even if they were not intended to be, and thus they may diminish the writer’s credibility. Worse, using sexist or racist language may distort the writer’s own perspective and keep him or her from viewing social issues clearly and objectively.
“Always” and “never” are two words you should always remember never to use.
—Wendell Johnson
Another tip on writing.
But language isn’t entirely not a matter of ethics, either. We are a society that aspires to be just, a society that strives not to withhold its benefits from individuals on the basis of their ethnic or racial background, skin color, religion, gender, or disability. As a people, we try to end practices and change or remove institutions that are unjustly discriminatory. Some of these unfair practices and institutions are, unfortunately, embedded in our language.
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Some common ways of speaking and writing, for example, assume that “normal” people are all white males. It is still not uncommon, for instance, to mention a person’s race, gender, or ethnic background if the person is not a white male, and not to do so if the person is. Of course, it may be relevant to whatever you are writing about to state that this particular individual is a male of Irish descent, or whatever; if so, there is absolutely nothing wrong with saying so.
Some language practices are particularly unfair to women. Imagine a conversation among three people, you being one of them. Imagine that the other two talk only to each other. When you speak, they listen politely; but when you are finished, they continue as though you had never spoken. Even though what you say is true and relevant to the discussion, the other two proceed as though you were invisible. Because you are not being taken seriously, you are at a considerable disadvantage. You have reason to be unhappy.
In an analogous way, women have been far less visible in language than men and have thus been at a disadvantage. Another word for the human race is not “woman,” but “man” or “mankind.” The generic human has often been referred to as “he.” How do you run a project? You man it. Who supervises the department or runs the meeting? The chairman. Who heads the crew? The foreman. Picture a research scientist to yourself. Got the picture? Is it a picture of a woman? No? That’s because the standard picture, or stereotype, of a research scientist is a picture of a man. Or, read this sentence: “Research scientists often put their work before their personal lives and neglect their husbands.” Were you surprised by the last word? Again, the stereotypical picture of a research scientist is a picture of a man.
A careful and precise writer finds little need to converse in the lazy language of stereotypes, especially those that perpetuate prejudice. As long as the idea prevails that the “normal” research scientist is a man, women who are or who wish to become research scientists will tend to be thought of as out of place. So they must carry an extra burden, the burden of showing that they are not out of place. That’s unfair. If you unthinkingly always write, “The research scientist . . . he,” you are perpetuating an image that places women at a disadvantage. Some research scientists are men, and some are women. If you wish to make a claim about male research scientists, do so. But if you wish to make a claim about research scientists in general, don’t write as though they were all males.
The rule to follow in all cases is this: Keep your writing free of irrelevant implied evaluation of gender, race, ethnic background, religion, or any other human attribute.
Recap
This list summarizes the topics covered in this chapter:
■Clarity of language is extremely important to the ability to think critically.
■Clarity of language can often be lost as a result of multiple causes, including, importantly, vagueness, ambiguity, and generality.
■Vagueness is a matter of degree; what matters is not being too vague for the purposes at hand.
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■A statement is ambiguous when it is subject to more than one interpretation and it isn’t clear which interpretation is the correct one.
■Some main types of ambiguity are semantic ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, grouping ambiguity, and ambiguous pronoun reference.
■A claim is overly general when it lacks sufficient detail to restrict its application to the immediate subject.
■To reduce vagueness or eliminate ambiguity, or when new or unfamiliar words are brought into play, or familiar words are used in an unusual way, definitions are our best tool.
■The most common types of definitions are definition by synonym, definition by example, and analytical definition.
■Some “definitions” are used not to clarify meaning but to express or influence attitude. This is known as the rhetorical use of definition.
■The rhetorical use of definitions accomplishes its ends by means of the rhetorical force (emotive meaning) of terms.
